A two-year long legal battle against an unlicensed gun range will likely drag on after a major misstep by the Charles County judicial system.
While a 2022 injunction preventing gunfire at the property on Fire Tower Road in Welcome remains in place, Byron David Bell Sr., who owns the property, had a $309,000 lien removed from his house on July 9 due to the Charles County courts failing to allow an alternative way to serve him notice of a hearing.
Despite the injunction, residents of the area reported to Southern Maryland News as recently as March that gunfire had resumed.
“The shooting has not ceased at all,” Wes Thomlinson, who owns property on the other side of the treeline that the gun range fires into, said in March.
Thomlinson alleged he had found multiple bullet holes in his barn.
County government alleged that Bell had taken action to avoid being served in the past, and had failed to show up to hearings.
A county spokesperson said earlier this week that the county attorney’s office had no comment or statement to offer regarding the ongoing issue.
Judge Karen Abrams said that in one of the missed hearings, Bell said that he had not been served properly, but Abrams says that she knew he was aware of the hearings because of inflammatory social media posts made about the hearing that caused an increased security presence at the courthouse that day.
Abrams equated Bell’s alleged evasion of being served to “teasing.”
Knowing how hard it was to provide proper legal notice of a hearing to Bell, the county sought to serve Bell in an “alternative way,” namely by posting a notice on his property.
The notice was posted, but it was shown at a hearing on July 9 that the court system never gave the authorization to post that notice despite the county filing a motion.
Bell’s motion to vacate a contempt order — and subsequently the lien — was approved after the court’s failure to approve the order came to light.
“This is a shameful case. We’re going to keep going with this,” Abrams said to Bell. “I’m warning you, don’t shoot on your property, there will be consequences.”
She continued, saying, “The neighborhood people in the audience are cursing me right now.”
Bell identifies as a Moorish American, which is a collection of independent organizations and individuals that emerged in the early 1990s as an offshoot of the antigovernment sovereign citizens movement, adherents of which believe that individual citizens hold sovereignty over, and are independent of, the authority of federal and state governments, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Jibril Brown and Tamara Jones of the Legal Courthouse — a general practice law firm that describes itself as committed to advancing the civil rights of marginalized individuals through innovative and passionate litigation — represented Bell and said that they were “satisfied” with the court’s decision.
“All he needed to do was cease shooting. … I thought that was the end of the story,” Abrams said.
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