Wife of slain clerk: ‘There is no justice'

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Brenda Hatfield has been a nurse for 34 years, but said she’s never seen anything so gruesome as the pummeling her husband suffered last weekend.

Brenda and her son, Ryan, went looking for Gary Hatfield, 54, last Saturday after he was late coming home from work as a clerk at H and D Movie Sales in Finksburg.

Charging documents show they found him in the back of the store, beaten to death with a fire extinguisher and stabbed in the chest.

“There is no justice for something like this,” she said. “The things this guy did to my husband are just unbelievable, and that’s the vision my son will live with for the rest of his life.”

State police arrested Michael Ryan Anderson, 26, of the unit block of Winchester Avenue in Westminster Sunday morning, charging him with first- and second-degree murder, robbery and theft.

Anderson left his parents’ house, about a quarter mile from the video store, at 8 the night of the killing and told his mother, Diane, he was going snow-tubing with a friend, according to the documents.

But at 11 p.m., he was knocking on Diane’s front door with a cut on his finger and blood-soaked boots and socks, the documents show.

He had no cut on his foot, Hatfield was killed in the time Anderson was gone and Anderson admitted to dumping the clerk’s cell phone in the shrubs behind the shopping center, according to the documents.

Carroll County District Court Judge JoAnn Ellinghaus-Jones Monday denied Anderson bail.

“I don’t want him to get a slap on the wrist,” Brenda Hatfield said. “I don’t want my boys five years down the road looking over their shoulder.”

Gary had undergone several major surgeries and had lost control of one arm, Brenda said, so he would have not have been able to fight back.

“My husband was physically handicapped,” she said. “This guy, being a customer in his store before, knew that.”

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com

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