When John Gaumer was in high school, another student tried to pick a fight with him. Gaumer, a 6??6? and 225 lb football player, could have wiped the floor with the other student. Nevertheless, no matter what his antagonist said, he refused to take the bait.

But late last Tuesday night, Gaumer, enrolled at UMBC until last week, confessed to police that just four days after Christmas, he beat 27-year-old Baltimore resident Josie Phyllis Brown to death with a blunt object on the side of an I-95 off-ramp and left her body in the woods.