Escapology to open escape room in Rockville

Escape rooms are continuing to pop up around Montgomery County, but Escapology will be the first to open at a new, "town center" development. Pike & Rose will be the first such development to lease to an escape room in the County. Escapology will be located on Old Georgetown Road, next to the NAVA Health & Vitality Center.

Escapology's escape room games will host up to eight players at once. The first game being offered at the Pike & Rose location is Antidote. Set in 2015 in the Nevada desert, the game challenges you and your teammates to find the antidote to a biological weapon virus that has infected everyone inside a secret facility - after a clumsy member of your team accidentally releases it. Locked inside the contaminated facility, you must locate the antidote and escape before the facility self-destructs.

Photos courtesy Escapology

Derwood hit-and-run victim dies

Montgomery County police announced that one of the victims of a suspected hit-and-run collision in Derwood on November 18 has died. Oscar Eduardo Rivas-Macal, 23, of Gaithersburg was thrown from the 2006 Chevrolet Cobalt in which he had been a passenger that night. The car left the roadway and rolled over on an embankment off Muncaster Road. Rivas-Macal died Friday at a local hospital, police revealed over the weekend.

The driver of the Cobalt remains in stable condition. Police are still looking for a dark-colored Ford Mustang, which they believe may have been involved in the accident. However, detectives have released no tag number, model year(s) or other identifying information about the Mustang, making this a needle-in-a-haystack search covering cars from the 1964 to the 2019 model year.

Anyone with information about this accident is asked to call the Collision Reconstruction Unit at 240-773-6620.

GSK Biopharm seeking "best and brightest" for its Rockville expansion

Rockville pharmaceutical manufacturer GSK Biopharm is recruiting new employees for its expanded facility. The firm held an informational reception for potential employees at True Respite Brewery last week. Biotech is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise-moribund Montgomery County economy, and GSK is in the process of a $139 million expansion.

“Working at GSK Rockville has been an extremely rewarding experience for me," GSK Supply Chain Logistics Specialist Andrew Buscemi told BioBuzz, an online publication about the regional biotech industry. "The work we do here is very engaging and truly makes a difference in people’s lives,” said Buscemi, "The opportunity to provide life-changing medicines to people is further enhanced by the people and positive culture here at Rockville.  Site leaders are very purposeful in cultivating a sustainable work-life integration, which is one reason I hope to stay with GSK for a long time to come.”

Prospective employees can fill out a Recruitment Survey form online.

Rockville Town Square Christmas decorations (Photos)

The Christmas tree was lit last Friday at Rockville Town Square. Here are some photos of that, and other holiday lights around the development.

Rockville Pike Craft Beer & Wine opens (Photos)

Rockville Pike Craft Beer & Wine has opened at 1800-D Rockville Pike, in the ground floor of The Galvan apartments near the Twinbrook Metro station. The interior looks modern and sleek, and they have a nice bar and tasting area in the front part of the store. Certainly a much-appreciated addition for residents of the building.

Pho 95 reopens in Rockville (Menu+Photos)

Pho 95 has reopened under new management after a renovation of the restaurant, which is located in the Ritchie Center on Rockville Pike. The menu looks good. Pho 95 is next to the new Japong Bakery in the shopping center.

Montgomery County embezzlement covered up until after Election Day

Officials were told

$6.7 million stolen in

April 2017 by IRS;

plea deal was in works

long before Election Day

Montgomery County elected officials withheld the fact that a County employee had embezzled nearly $7 million in taxpayer funds until after Election Day on November 6. The case and the cover-up again prove that the local media, including the Washington Post, are not actively investigating corruption in County government. And that there's no low our elected officials won't stoop to in protecting themselves and their allies in the Montgomery County political cartel.

Media reports show little questioning of officials in all three branches of Montgomery County government, two of which - the Executive and County Council - had direct oversight of Byung Ill "Peter" Bang, who allegedly embezzled over $6.7 million while serving as chief operating officer of the Department of Economic Development.

The press apparently believes it is credible to assert that neither the Executive branch nor the Council noticed $7 million unaccounted for, over a seven year period. To show how obsequious the press is toward Montgomery County officials, the same Washington Post that sent three reporters to Tallahassee to investigate Andrew Gillum's developer scandal and Judge Roy Moore's prowling of local malls in Alabama, supposedly never caught one sniff of the Bang case brought to County Executive Ike Leggett's attention by the IRS in April of 2017?

Unreal.

According to Leggett himself, entire new divisions and units were created in the Executive branch, a new contractor was procured and funded (by the Council, which must make all such disbursements), and every single manager in County government was specially retrained - all since April 2017. Yet none of these transactions were noticed, and not a single employee leaked the story to the Post or any other media outlet?

Please.

Consider how bad the story makes reporter and Democrat County Council uber-fan Jennifer Barrios of the Post and others look. Journalism 101 would suggest a quick review of campaign finance and judicial records for the suspect. Yet no story I could find about the Bang scandal mentions two cases easily found in Maryland court records - a foreclosure of a Gaithersburg property owned by a Byung Ill Bang in 2007, and a tax lien judgement entered against a Byung Ill Bang less than three months ago in Montgomery County Circuit Court, for failure to pay state taxes. Both closed cases should be highly relevant to a financial fraud news story, wouldn't you agree?

Montgomery County elected officials failed to notice incredible sums of missing money, clearly indicating that - unless they were in on the action - they never audited Mr. Bang's department over the entire last decade. Remember when a nonprofit politically-connected to the Council "lost" hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds it couldn't account for a decade ago? The press not only didn't "follow the money," but stopped asking about the missing money altogether. Voters who just wanted 9 Democrats on the County Council - literally no matter what - went ahead and reelected the same old crooks again - hey, what's a few hundred thousand dollars, right?

There's a price to be paid for such ignorance - $6.7 million, in this latest instance alone. That's how much taxpayers are out thanks to corrupt and inept elected officials, "journalists" who are in the tank for the local political cartel, and the low-information lemmings who make up a sizable chunk of the Montgomery County electorate.

It's beyond credibility to suggest that the timing of Mr. Bang's dual court appearances Friday - not only a week after Election Day, but the traditional day when anyone who has bad news releases it to get lost on the weekend - was not politically-coordinated at all levels to protect Montgomery County Democrat elected officials. The same officials who facilitated and enabled Bang to allegedly pull off a $7 million heist in the first place.

It's outrageous.