For Matt McCullough, 'beef' costs a lifetime

Gregory Kane of the Balitmore Sun examines the recent sentencing of a youth convicted of firing shots into a crowd due to a 'beef' with another youth. A good one about a Judge who has had enough.//JW sends.

COST OF 'BEEF' SKYROCKETS; MATT MCCULLOUGH SLAPPED WITH 100-YEAR BIT

There's a headline written in language that Matthew Timothy McCullough can understand. McCullough, who'll be 68 when he's eligible for parole half a century from now, was only a boy of 17 when he was having "beef" last May with another boy at Randallstown High School.

McCullough could have let the matter drop, let it die, squashed it. But he didn't. Ignoring admonitions of Randallstown High administrators to stay away and cool off, McCullough returned to the school with a veritable pistolero posse. After fighting broke out, Tyrone Devon Brown - who had come to back up McCullough - grabbed a gun and fired into a crowd of students. Witnesses testified that Brown then handed the gun to McCullough, who fired some more.

Four young men were wounded. One of them, William "Tippa" Thomas III, was paralyzed. Thomas will have to pay for the cost of "beef" for the rest of his life.

On Thursday, it was McCullough's turn to pay up.

And pay he did, with that 100-year sentence Baltimore County Circuit Judge Patrick Cavanaugh gave him. Charged with four counts of assault, McCullough got the maximum 25 years for each, to run consecutively.