A Fairfax County jury deliberated for less than 20 minutes Tuesday before exonerating a Fairfax woman of failing to clean up after Baxter, the fluffy Westie-bichon frise mix she cares for. The verdict came after a tense, funny and strange day-long trial that featured photos of dog piles submitted as evidence, a lengthy dissection of Baxter’s diet and a witness who brought a bag of poop to the courthouse, although not inside.

Virginia and Christine Cornell had accused next-door neighbor Kimberly Zakrzewski of violating the county’s “pooper scooper” law by allowing the pooch to relieve himself on the grounds of their condominium complex, near Route 50.

“This case wasn’t about whether I picked up after Baxter. It was about two women who wanted to harass me,” a teary Zakrzewski said shortly after the verdict was read and her supporters clapped. “I can only hope this verdict will be the end of the harassment for me.”

The Fairfax story began on a cold, dark morning in April. Kimberly Zakrzewski, 46, was out walking Baxter, a friend’s dog she often cares for.

Virginia Cornell, a neighbor, said she saw Zakrzewski walk away after Baxter made a mess on the grounds of the Penderbrook complex near Route 50. She called police and filed a complaint under Fairfax’s “pooper scooper” law.

Cornell, who works in the legal profession, said she took a photo of the waste that she plans to submit as evidence at trial, along with testimony from the police officer who took the complaint.

“She was letting the dog poop on purpose because she knew it annoyed us,” Cornell said, referring to herself and a sister who lives with her. “This individual has no respect or regard for anyone else and views herself as above the law.”

Zakrzewski, a stay-at-home mom who often cares for Baxter, said no such incident occurred. She said she carries plastic bags on each walk and never leaves any poop behind.

The dog walker said her attorney will call Baxter’s owner to testify that the dog pile in the photo could not have been Baxter’s — it was the wrong size and consistency. That testimony, she said, will be buttressed by that of another dog walker and Zakrzewski’s husband, Michael, who was with her on the morning in question.

But wait, there's more!

Photo by Doug Wallick via Flickr/Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 License

• A man collapsed in the Smithsonian Metro station Tuesday, and no one stopped to help him. By the time someone checked, he had died.
• MetroAccess drivers have been paying out-of-pocket for riders who need the service, but can't afford it.
• Facing a $72 million funding gap, Metro's considering cutting services.
• Fairfax officials approved names for the stations on the long-fabled Silver Line. Unfortunately, the names aren't very exciting.
• Metro Transit Police say they're "overwhelmed" and short-staffed—though they also say Wednesdays go pretty well.
• A former Metro employee says a lot of the system's problems are due to an overly strict chain-of-command.
• Bar owners aren't thrilled about continued speculation that Metro's going to close at midnight on the weekend.
• WMATA apparently can't spell "Metropolitan." Or "expedite," for that matter.

Looking for more news roundups? Check out our newest feature, Neighborhood News Roundup!

10000 Block Lee Hwy., Fairfax, VA.  © 2011 Matt Dunn

Did you know that much of the city’s trash is trucked to Fairfax County, where it is incinerated and turned into electricity? According to the Department of Public Works and the “waste-to-energy” industry, it's a "win-win" scenario; the trash disappears and the country reduces its dependence on foreign oil. What could be more patriotic, especially since officials say filters on the smokestacks keep nasty pollutants from escaping into the air around the Lorton plant.

Well, in a report released today, environmentalists take aim at those claims. Clean Water Action, the Toxics Action Center and six other groups from around the country are seeking to debunk the growing buzz around waste-to-energy plants as sources of clean “alternative” fuel. Their conclusion: an incinerator is an incinerator is an incinerator. 

"The core impacts of all types of incinerators remain the same: They are toxic to public health, harmful to the economy, environment and climate, and undermine recycling and waste reduction programs,” according to the report, “An Industry Blowing Smoke."

While this information is certainly cause for alarm, it does not accurately reflect the District's school system because the data specifically ignores the graduation rates of public charter schools, which, according to Friends of Choice in Urban Schools, is 24 percent higher than other public schools in D.C.  The data was also derived between 1996 and 2006, before Michelle Rhee came in to revamp the school system. Since then, graduation rates have risen but not drastically enough to signify a complete turnaround.  After all, the Obamas and other important figures in this city have rarely considered sending their children to public schools, favoring expensive private schools with plenty of resources or more stable public schools in the suburbs.

Speaking of suburbs, the discrepancy between the District's graduation rates and the graduation rates of neighboring school districts in Maryland and Virginia is truly astounding. A chart published on Education Week's Web site lists the graduation rates of the 50 largest school districts in the nation, and Montgomery County, Maryland, leads the country with a graduation rate of 80.7 percent.  Fairfax County Public Schools posts a graduation rate of 78.8 percent.  Location is by no means the only determinant in school success but access to resources and attention certainly make a difference.  D.C. is trying to keep up by developing more charter schools and closing underenrolled schools in order to save money, but something needs to be done in order to drag the city schools out of the depths.

Yesterday, an important moment came between all the memorials and tributes marking the two-year anniversary of the massacre at Virgina Tech. Two victims' families filed lawsuits in Fairfax County. The families of Julia Kathleen Pryde and Erin Nicole Peterson had opted out of the $11 million settlement and had to meet a two-year time limit to file suits. They met their deadline.

Good for them.

I had a feeling the Peterson family would choose to fight over taking such a settlement. I had met them just hours after the tragedy. They had still not heard about their daughter. They waited in the lobby of a hotel/conference center. The medical examiner had quit for the night. The family refused to sleep.

In the morning after, the Peterson family still hadn't gotten word from the ME. They were furious. I was there in the lobby. They grew suspicious of Tech's volunteer handlers and flacks.They wanted to express their anger to reporters. The handlers tried to shield them, prevent them from talking, from straying far from the script. I chronicled the tense scene for a cover story.

Here's what the family told me about Erin:

Erin picked Virginia Tech because it was still close enough to home. This past weekend, she had been accepted into the university’s honor society fraternity and her parents drove down to take her shopping and out to dinner.

“She was just a super child,” says William Lloyd, Erin’s godfather. “Never ran the streets. Her and her dad, man, you couldn’t separate them. He lost a child from cancer —a daughter, 8 years old. A week later, [Erin] was born.”

The only time Erin and her father, Grafton, parted ways was when the Redskins played the Cowboys. “She was a Redskin,” Lloyd says. “He was a Cowboy.”

If you knew Erin, you'd be angry too. Mary Peterson told the volunteers that she was tried of watching them drink coffee. She wanted answers. Maybe now, the family will get those answers.

The two families would certainly have a supporter in Lucinda Roy, a V-Tech professor who tried to help Cho. She recently published a book called No Right To Remain Silent: The Tragedy at Virginia Tech. Yesterday afternoon, I heard her on NPR. She mourned the loss of her students. But she also mourned the behavior of the school's administration both before and after the tragedy. She suggested they simply have not done enough to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

Roy had tutored Cho one-on-one and had pressed him to get counseling. Yet, Roy told NPR, the administration has not once asked her for advice on how to prevent such tragedies from happening again. They never once solicited her experience or insight in the past two years.

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

The show is yet another link to an amazing and underpublicized chain in the area's pop cultural history. It goes back to brothers Izzy and Irvin Feld, who were literally snake oil salesmen growing up in Hagerstown in the 1920s, and later started a record business in the 1940s out of their store, Super Cut Rate Drugs, a pharmacy on 7th St. NW in Shaw.

The record retailing operation, which quickly turned into a cash cow by catering to the city's otherwise ignored black pop fans, led the Felds to form a production company that booked concerts and other large entertainment events.

The Felds took over management of Ringling Bros. in 1957, and bought the circus whole a decade later.

Musically, among the Felds claims to fame are discovering Paul Anka, promoting Buddy Holly's last tour in 1959, and producing some shows on the Beatles U.S. tours, including a Baltimore Civic Center concert in 1964 and the DC Stadium show in August 1966, held about week before the Fab Four gave up live performances altogether.

(A case could easily be made that without the Felds, Beatlemania never would have happened on

our side of the pond, since the brothers' budget-cutting decisions to use inferior and often heat-less buses and to institute a no-days-off scheduling policy on the Holly tour inspired the headliner to rent his own plane, which crashed in a snowstorm in Clear Lake, Iowa in February 1959. Had Holly lived and continued to spread his songwriting genius, America likely would have had much less demand for the similar sort of pop music the Beatles used to take over Britain in the early 1960s.)

Irvin Feld's son, Kenneth Feld, took over the family business in 1984 and still runs the circus out of Feld Entertainment's Vienna headquarters.

The Feld family, for all its contributions to the entertainment world and loyalty to the DC area — once more: these folks brought the Beatles here, literally and figuratively — has almost no public presence in its hometown.

Sadly, the only publicity the Felds get comes from the oddities surrounding Irvin's daughter Karen Feld, a gossip columnist for the DC Examiner when that paper hit town in 2005.

She's currently suing brother Kenneth for a 2007 incident with Kenneth at an aunt's memorial service.

Talk about a family circus.