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Lawyer portrays man charged with pushing man to death as “good Samaritan”

By CNN

MD: MURDER SUSPECT PORTRAYED AS GOOD SAMARITAN

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    BALTIMORE (WJZ) — A man charged with killing another man by pushing him into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor during a fight on Sunday appeared in court Tuesday to face second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault charges. During the appearance, the public defender for James Fitzsimmons portrayed his client as a “good Samaritan.”

The 36-year-old Fitzsimmons is accused of shoving James Britt, 37, to his death in the water after a physical fight between the two. Police say security video shows them fighting in the alley behind the 700 block of S. Eden Street just after 3 p.m.

Court documents allege Britt started walking away from Fitzsimmons and toward the water when the suspect followed. After catching up to Britt, police claim Fitzsimmons pushed Britt into the water. Britt later died at the hospital.

Prosecutors claimed the suspect had a “callous disregard for human life”.

But the defense argued the incident was accidental and that Fitzsimmons “should’ve minded his own business.” The public defender said Fitzsimmons was trying to intervene after observing Britt “verbally abusing” a woman.

The suspect’s attorney said Britt was the aggressor, headbutting and swinging his belt at Fitzsimmons when he got involved. The public defender also said that as Britt walked away, he continued to provoke Fitzsimmons and asked his girlfriend to get something out of her purse for him.

The public defender said the suspect pushed Britt after his knees buckled near the water. However, his attorney claims Fitzsimmons reached to try and grab Britt as he fell. Police say security video shows Fitzsimmons pushed Britt.

Court records say Fitzsimmons told police he was in a fight with Britt, but that the victim fell in and wasn’t pushed. He also told investigators Britt’s girlfriend told him Britt couldn’t swim to which he replied, “Oh well” and walked away.

The public defender said Fitzsimmons left because he believed the water was shallow and that Britt would be fine.

The public defender said Fitzsimmons is a bartender at Keystone Korner in Harbor East. His co-worker, going by Liz in this story, tells WJZ he had a shift starting at 3:30 p.m. Sunday and that he was a good man.

“We referred to him as the security guard at Keystone even though we didn’t have one, James was always making sure everybody was okay,” Liz said.

She called Fitzsimmons protective and said she believed he was trying to diffuse the verbal argument. “I could see this all coming about because he was trying to save someone from danger,” Liz added.

In court, prosecutors said Fitzsimmons has prior convictions in Virginia and New York, as well as an active warrant in Pennsylvania.

The judge said Fitzsimmons is a flight risk and a danger to others. She ordered him to be held without bail. He is due back in court later this month.

WJZ has tried to reach out to the Britt family but has not made contact with them.

Britt was arrested twice in the last few weeks on burglary charges in Baltimore County. His address listed in those cases was an outpatient treatment center in Baltimore City.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

Highest resolution view of the sun yet reveals magnetic mysteries

By CNN
(CNN) — The world’s most powerful solar telescope has captured the highest resolution observations of the sun’s visible surface — and uncovered a hidden process that drives solar activity.Scientists used the National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located near the summit of Haleakalā, a volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui, to zoom into a magnetically active area near a sunspot. Sunspots are considered hotspots of solar activity.The imagery and time-lapse video reveal an unprecedented look at the sun’s complex and dynamic photosphere, the visible surface of the sun that exists as a thin layer of atmosphere shaped by magnetic fields and currents of fluid plasma.Combining the detailed imagery with computer simulations helped researchers arrive at a major solar physics breakthrough: identifying the signature of small whirlpools on the sun’s surface that could directly impact life on Earth.Known as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, or KHI, the swirling patterns could explain enduring solar mysteries, such as why the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere, is much hotter than its surface.The swirls could also fuel the buildup of the sun’s magnetic energy, which drives solar flares and coronal mass ejections. When aimed at Earth, this solar activity blasts out particles that can disrupt satellites, power grids and other communications infrastructure.The findings, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, could help scientists understand the sun’s behavior and activity, which is difficult to predict.“Although theoretical models had suggested that the right conditions for Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability could exist in the photosphere, seeing these structures widespread across the surface was still a huge surprise,” lead study author Dr. David Kuridze, assistant astronomer at the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, wrote in an email. “The vortex formation on the Sun has long been a central question in solar physics. For the first time, we have identified both their origin and their driving mechanism.”A constantly shifting surfaceKelvin-Helmholtz instability occurs when two fluids traveling at different velocities move past one another, creating tiny perturbations that result in spiraling vortices, according to the study.Scientists have observed this instability pattern in lake and ocean waves, cloud formation and the atmospheres of large gaseous planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.“A beautiful example of KHIs happens at the boundaries of Jupiter’s cloud bands, leading to vortices along the edges,” said Dr. Maria Weber, associate professor of physics and planetarium director at Delta State University in Mississippi. “The granddaddy of them all is the Great Red Spot.”Weber was not involved in the new study.The images from the Inouye telescope mark the first time the phenomenon has been seen on the sun.Scientists have long believed that the sun builds up stores of magnetic energy through “flux braiding,” when magnetic field lines twist together. The tension eventually becomes unstable, causing the tangle of magnetic fields to snap apart and then magnetically reconnect, releasing a burst of energy. But researchers never quite understood why these twisting patterns occur in the first place — but the new observations offer a possible explanation.Swirls occurring along the edges of magnetic regions across the solar surface could twist the fields together, the researchers realized. The formations also explain how heat makes its way to the sun’s outer atmosphere.“KHI is a really efficient way for the Sun to break big plasma flows down into smaller motions,” Kuridze said. “When you have KHI in the system, it makes it much easier to trigger an energy cascade toward tiny, microscopic scales and once energy reaches those micro-scales, it can easily be released as heat. Therefore, finding KHI across the solar surface gives us a very important missing piece of the puzzle.”The magnetic vortices generated by Kelvin-Helmholtz instability effectively act like small-scale engines that can generate, transport and release energy throughout the solar surface, he said.“We are still trying to piece together the full story about how the sun generates and sustains its magnetism, on all scales,” Weber said. “This work helps.”The constantly moving whirlpools can act as energy stores for larger solar activity, such as flares and coronal mass ejections. But the sun is firing tiny nanoflares and other smaller-scale activity every second, Kuridze added.“As it turns out, these micro-events are more influential for the Sun’s thermal and magnetic structure than rare, massive flares,” he said. “There is a strong consensus within the solar physics community that unlocking global solar behavior begins with understanding these micro-scales. Solar magnetism is fundamentally shaped by these small-scale events, which ultimately drive the space weather that impacts Earth’s technological infrastructure.”Dr. Nour Rawafi, project scientist for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, said the discovery is a breakthrough that could significantly improve how scientists understand of the dynamics of the sun’s lower atmosphere. Rawafi was not involved in the new study.“It provides a possible mechanism for how the abundant mechanical energy generated in the lower solar atmosphere and convection zone is transformed and transferred into the Sun’s upper atmosphere,” Rawafi wrote in an email. “The widespread swirls and the associated Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities make physical sense — we simply didn’t have the ability to observe the tiny solar structures where they occur so abundantly.”The telescope observations very closely matched advanced computer simulations that were also run by the team during the study. The simulations enabled the team to interpret what they were seeing from the telescope’s data and tease out details that are more difficult to measure with observation alone.Future observations could pinpoint the exact physical connections that enable predictions of large flares and solar storms.The observations were possible thanks to the Inouye telescope, which has provided awe-inspiring solar imagery since 2019.The telescope has a mirror with a 13-foot (4-meter) diameter, an adaptive optics system that corrects image blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere and instruments that can gather observations across the sun’s photosphere, the second layer of its atmosphere called the chromosphere and the corona, said study coauthor Dr. Friedrich Wöger, senior scientist at the National Solar Observatory.“The scale and performance of the Inouye combined with its unique instrumental capabilities make it a one-of-its-kind world class facility, enabling this kind of work,” Wöger said.Rawafi believes this is just the beginning for what the telescope could reveal about the sun.“It’s opening an entirely new window on the Sun, and I expect many more transformative discoveries to follow,” he wrote.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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