Former Glenelg Students Sentenced In Hate Crime

ELLICOTT CITY, MD — Two former Glenelg High School students were sentenced for a hate crime Thursday committed at the Howard County school in May 2018. They marked the campus with racial, anti-Semitic and anti-LBGTQ slurs and symbols, according to prosecutors.

Administrators and custodians found graffiti spray-painted around the campus hours before an awards ceremony for the senior class on May 24, 2018, prosecutors said.

It was not a "simple act of vandalism," Assistant State’s Attorney Melissa Montgomery, who prosecuted the case, said in a statement afterward. The teens "maliciously carried out a plan to deface their school property with hateful, vile, vicious language," Montgomery said.

The school resource officer identified the four responsible through video surveillance and the Glenelg High School wi-fi logs, which revealed the teens' cell phones connected to the network at the time of the crime, officials said.

It was 11:30 p.m. on May 28, 2018, when surveillance video showed four suspects in masks committing the widespread vandalism, prosecutors reported.

These two were sentenced on Thursday, April 4, in Howard County Circuit Court:

• Matthew Lipp, 19, of Daisy Road in Woodbine, will serve 16 weekends in jail. He was said to have spray-painted messages of hate targeting people for their sexual preference, religion and race.
• Tyler Curtiss, 18, of Rivercrest Court in Brookeville, will serve eight weekends in jail. He reportedly spray-painted swastikas and male genitalia.

Both Lipp and Curtiss had pleaded not guilty but agreed to the statement of facts provided by prosecutors.

While both teens apologized in court on Thursday for what they claimed was a prank they committed while intoxicated, Lipp's lawyer said that it was a "heavy-handed approach to charge as a hate crime" when the case could have been considered destruction of property, WJZ reported.

Judge William V. Tucker sentenced Lipp and Curtiss to the following in addition to their weekend jail time: three years of supervised probation, 250 hours of community service, drug and alcohol screening/treatment, restitution for damages to Glenelg High School, plus court costs and a fine.

Their sentences started Thursday after they appeared in court, when they were taken away in handcuffs, according to The Baltimore Sun, which reported in the future, their 48-hour jail stints will run from 6 p.m. Friday to Sunday.

Two others who pleaded guilty in the case were sentenced last month.

• Joshua Shaffer, 19, of Wetkins Way in Mount Airy, was sentenced to 18 weekends in jail.
• Seth Taylor, of Mustang Path in Glenwood, was sentenced to nine weekends in jail.

Shaffer spray-painted a racial slur directed at the school's African-American principal, according to The Baltimore Sun, which said Taylor wrote swastikas and KKK messages in spray paint.

“We are a community that respects and embraces diversity and this act of hate-filled vandalism stands in direct contradiction to our community’s values," Howard County State’s Attorney Rich Gibson Jr. said after sentencing.