Father Arrested in Death He Blamed on Hitchhiker

A Laurel man who told authorities that an armed hitchhiker abducted his two children and then threw him off a bridge into the Choptank River was arrested here Thursday and charged with shooting to death his 2-year-old son and critically wounding his 3-year-old daughter.

Police said the man, Richard W. Spicknall II, 27, shot the children and then staged the carjacking.

The children, still strapped in their car seats in their father’s Jeep, were found about 8 a.m. Thursday less than half a mile from the Frederick C. Malkus Jr. Memorial Bridge by construction workers arriving at the site of an unfinished home, authorities said.

Sources said that they tried to revive both children. The boy, Richard Spicknall III, was pronounced dead at Dorchester County Hospital, doctors and police said.

The girl, Destiny Array Spicknall, was flown to the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, where she was listed in critical condition Thursday night. A doctor who treated the child said, “It’s going to be a long road until we have an outcome.”

Spicknall was charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, first-degree assault and a handgun count, state police spokesman Maj. Greg Shipley said. Shipley, who declined to say how many times the children were shot, said that the gun had not been recovered.

Police provided few details about what might have prompted Spicknall, former manager of the ESPN Zone sports bar in Baltimore, to attack his children.

“We obviously don’t believe his original story,” Shipley said of Spicknall. Skeptical residents were quick to poke holes in the emerging account, noting the height of the bridge (about 50 feet at its highest point), the Choptank’s strong and dangerous current (which presumably would have swept Spicknall in the opposite direction of where he supposedly emerged from the water east of the bridge) and the scarcity of pedestrians or hitchhikers on the bridge.