Baltimore County to decide who gets slain officer’s pension

TOWSON, Md. (AP) — A county board must decide whether a slain police officer’s pension should go to his widow or a child from a previous marriage.

Baltimore County officer Jason Schnieder was shot and killed in 2013 trying to serve a warrant.

His widow, Ericka Schneider Barnes, has been receiving the $75,000 annual pension under an agreement with county officials and Schneider’s first wife. But the deal called for the pension to revert to Schneider’s son, now 15, if Schneider Barnes remarried before the boy turned 18.

She remarried in 2016. But she said she did so in part because the county changed the law to allow widows to keep the pension even if they remarry.

County officials, though, say that change is not retroactive.

The Baltimore Sun reports a county appeals board will hold a hearing Feb. 14.

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