Gun threats in his past
Verombeck couldn’t legally own a shotgun; faces murder charges
Decades before he met Tyrique Hudson in Glen Burnie, the man charged with gunning down the 22-year-old walked into a Southern Maryland health department wielding a sawed-off shotgun.
Now, James Allan Verombeck faces murder charges in Anne Arundel County after police say he used a shotgun last month to kill Hudson — a promising software engineer who lived directly above the 53year-old school maintenance worker at an apartment complex near Marley Station mall.
Verombeck’s history as seen through court records, newspaper reports and people who knew him depict a troubled past that raises questions about his right to possess firearms. A 1996 conviction meant he legally couldn’t own a shotgun or rifle.
That outburst bears striking similarities to Verombeck’s encounter with Hudson. The young man asked a District Court judge to keep his neighbor away after unexplainable threats — a request that was denied.
Verombeck was described by witnesses as distraught when he entered the Calvert County Health Department on Oct. 3, 1996, threatening caseworkers before turning the loaded .410 gauge rifle on himself claiming he was suicidal, newspaper articles at the time detail. Then 30, Verombeck called the deVEROMBECK ,
Maryland law says a person is disqualified from possessing rifles or shotguns if they are involuntarily committed to a public or private facility that treats mental disorders.
VEROMBECK , partment director before storming the building, according to an article in the Calvert Independent — a community newspaper that has since folded. Police told reporters he was unsatisfied with the care he was receiving.
“Do you know what I look like?” Dr. David Rogers remembered Verombeck saying on the phone.
“No,” Rogers said he told Verombeck.
“If you see me, you better run.” Verombeck approached a case manager and told her to leave the area or he would hurt someone, according to the Maryland State Police report on the incident.
About 80 people fled the facility in Prince Frederick. Police found Verombeck in an office cubicle, the roughly 10-inch gun barrel drawn to his head, the Independent and the Calvert Recorder reported a few days later.
He told a state police trooper it “would be easy to walk in this office with a pump 12 gauge shotgun and kill 7 or 8 people,” the police report details.
The trooper was able to persuade the distraught man to surrender the shotgun after about an hour-long standoff. Sixteen Calvert County sheriff’s deputies — including a special operations team and investigators — and at least three troopers responded to the facility along Route 2/4, the newspapers reported.
The trooper who persuaded Verombeck to surrender the shotgun had a rapport with the then-Dunkirk resident, having responded to a similar situation with him about five years before, state police said at the time.
In 1991 or 1992, that trooper responded to the Calvert Memorial Hospital after Verombeck entered the emergency room with a shotgun and threatened to kill himself or others, according to the police report.
This spring, police said Verombeck’s behavior took a fatal turn.
Scores of Anne Arundel County police officers responded April 15 to Virginia Lane for reports of a long-haired white man firing a shotgun inside an apartment building. Officers found Hudson dead in the stairwell with gunshot wounds.
This time, police couldn’t coax Verombeck to surrender. He had barricaded himself inside his apartment. Special weapons officers ended a 10-hour standoff by blasting through the walls of an apartment adjacent to Verombeck’s unit.
Police charged Verombeck with first- and second-degree murder, first- and seconddegree assault, using a firearm in a felony violent crime and reckless endangerment.
An Anne Arundel County grand jury tacked on more offenses in an indictment handed up May10.
Verombeck is now charged with firstand second-degree assault, reckless endangerment and firearm use in a felony violent crime against John Johnson, a bystander on the day of Hudson’s shooting. Police said Johnson checked on Hudson in the stairwell after hearing the gunshots.
Verombeck, Johnson told police, pointed the shotgun at him and said “You’re next.”
The indictment also charges Verombeck with manslaughter in Hudson’s death and alleges he was disqualified from possessing a shotgun because he was convicted of a disqualifying crime.
Public defenders listed as representing Verombeck in court records didn’t respond to a request for comment.
There were eight court cases against Verombeck listed in electronic court records before he was charged April 16 in Hudson’s death.
Some civil: a divorce, two lawsuits from a Calvert County hospital. Others criminal: a domestic violence charge resulting in a protective order for his ex-wife, violating that protective order.
In only one criminal case, however, was he convicted — all other charges were postponed indefinitely.
Verombeck pleaded guilty Dec. 9, 1996, to possessing the unregistered weapon used in the health department confrontation. He faced charges of reckless endangerment, concealing a deadly weapon and being disorderly in a public place.
Newspapers reported Verombeck faced 13 years in prison and $11,500 in fines if convicted on all counts.
The Calvert County state’s attorney dropped all but the shotgun charge. Prosecutor Michelle Renee Saunders — now a District Court judge in Calvert County — did not respond to requests for comment.
Court records for this case are sparing. The District Court stripped the file years ago. Six documents remain, a skeleton of what could have been a thick file.
Verombeck’s attorney in 1996, Mark T. Foley, said he didn’t remember the case.
A District Court judge suspended all three years of Verombeck’s jail sentence, giving him three years of supervised probation.
In a document titled “Probation/Supervision Docket,” the judge wrote in shorthand Verombeck was not to go on the property of the Calvert County Health Department and to attend counseling in Prince Frederick “as directed by the [original] terms of release of Clifton T Perkins” — a state maximum security psychiatric hospital.
News reports at the time said Verombeck was taken to the psychiatric hospital for a mental evaluation. The police report explains that Verombeck was criminally charged and committed on an emergency basis after being evaluated. It’s unclear how long he was kept in the Jessup facility.
The Maryland Department of Health does not disclose any information about patients in state facilities, said Brittany Fowler, a department spokeswoman. But, “individuals can only be [placed] in Clifton T. Perkins if committed through the court.”
Exactly what transpired in court that resulted in Verombeck’s disposition in the ’90s is unclear.
But he wouldn’t pop up on a Maryland court’s radar again until 2001 — a traffic violation he pleaded guilty to. Probation before judgment, online court records show.
And again as a tumultuous marriage played out in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court.
Ann Saulter, his ex-wife, said their marriage — they were wedded in 2006 — left her fearing for her and her children’s lives.
After she filed for divorce, she said Verombeck would drive by her house almost daily. A domestic violence charge, a protective order and the violation of that order in 2010 followed.
If he’d just leave her alone, Saulter told prosecutors, they could set the cases aside — she didn’t want him jailed.
Then he fell off the court system’s radar. Until Hudson took the trash out in February.
“You know what you did,” Verombeck told Hudson, who wrote about the interaction in an application for a peace order.
Days later both men would stand in a Glen Burnie courtroom. Verombeck told District Court Judge Devy Patterson Russell that Hudson had been videotaping him in his apartment. He heard Hudson’s footsteps above, he told Russell. Hudson was watching him, Verombeck said.
Hudson wasn’t watching his downstairs neighbor, he told the judge.
Russell confirmed that Verombeck had never seen the camera he claimed Hudson was filming him with. She explained to Hudson that a peace order requires a pattern of behavior, not just one instance.
This was the first time the public school groundskeeper and the young engineer had ever interacted, so she denied the peace order. She asked the two to be more “neighborly.”
Two months later, police say Verombeck turned to a shotgun, again.
His unregistered shotgun conviction legally disqualified him from possessing a shotgun, said Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director for Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Maryland law says a person is disqualified from possessing rifles or shotguns if they are involuntarily committed to a public or private facility that treats mental disorders.
But just because it’s illegal for somebody with a disqualifying offense to get a gun, doesn’t mean it’s illegal for somebody to sell it to him, Nichols said. A licensed dealer or retail business would have to run a background check; a friend, an unlicensed dealer, or an online gun show wouldn’t.
Lawmakers in the Maryland General Assembly introduced legislation this year that would have regulated long guns like handguns and require background checks for the private sale of shotguns and rifles. The bills stalled.
Prosecutors and police won’t say how Verombeck got the firearm.
But this time, police say, he fired it.