A deadly mistake in Prince George's

A YOUNG WOMAN was murdered last week, an apparent victim of domestic violence and an unforgivable bureaucratic error.

Prince George's County police say that LaCole Hines, 17, was shot in the head Aug. 9 by Marcus D. Shipman, her 23-year-old boyfriend. Ms. Hines was in a Landover liquor store when Mr. Shipman allegedly walked in, shot her and sped away in a waiting car driven by a 16-year-old accomplice. Mr. Shipman and the teenager were arrested after they crashed the car. Ms. Hines died at an area hospital late last week.

What makes this heinous act all the more tragic is that it might have been prevented. Two weeks before the shooting, police issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Shipman after he threatened Ms. Hines with a gun -- a felony, first-degree assault. But he was never arrested because the Prince George's Sheriff's Office, which has primary responsibility for serving most of the warrants issued in the county, misfiled the document, the sheriff's office said. Instead of being handled on a priority basis, it was stashed away among misdemeanor warrants.

The employee responsible for the alleged mistake faces disciplinary action, the sheriff's office said, and the office has instituted a process by which the classification of warrants will be doubled-checked -- something that was apparently not being done before the Shipman mistake. "My heart goes out to the 17-year-old girl," Sheriff Michael A. Jackson said in a statement. Mr. Jackson, a Democrat who is running for county executive, labeled the incident "a very serious lapse in my agency." (Readers should know that The Post has endorsed one of Mr. Jackson's opponents, Rushern L. Baker III, in the Sept. 14 primary election for county executive.)

Mr. Jackson said that this lapse was an "isolated incident." But how can he know that this was an aberration? For years, the sheriff's office has had severe problems carrying out its duty to serve warrants in a timely fashion. In 2002, when Mr. Jackson was first elected, the office had a backlog of 30,000 unserved warrants. This was a major campaign issue for Mr. Jackson, who used it as an argument for unseating the incumbent sheriff.

Yet now he won't or can't provide even a ballpark figure of outstanding warrants. His spokesman asserts that the office "has no backlog," but that is only because the office now refuses to use that term; the backlog has become a "structural inventory." Rafael Hylton, a member of the sheriff's office who is running to replace Mr. Jackson, puts the backlog at 48,000 warrants. Mr. Hylton told the Gazette newspaper that shrinking the backlog will be a priority if he is elected.

Backlogs and errors are almost inevitable when dealing with the thousands of warrants that sheriffs' offices are asked to serve each year. But Mr. Jackson's apparent failure to control the problem and his unwillingness now even to acknowledge it all but guarantee mistakes. In the case of LaCole Hines, the carelessness proved fatal.