On January 4 at Community Waste Disposal’s recycling center off Northwest Highway, driver Israel Esparza pulled his truck onto the scales, fresh from his route in the Walnut Hill area with a load of bottles, cans and newspapers retrieved from the city’s loyal recyclers. He used a keypad linked to…

Charlotte Scott remembers being in the kitchen preparing for a barbecue when her husband’s stepfather, Kerry Quinney, walked in and scooped up her 3-year-old son Matthew for a visit to the tigers. “Kerry said, ‘OK, let’s go.’ I said, ‘What are you doing?'” Scott recalls. His adult daughter Nikki, who…

Political insiders always suspected that ballots mailed to certain parts of Southern Dallas were for sale. They knew the blind, the elderly and the infirm–mostly black–were told how to vote by friendly and helpful campaign workers. And they knew the ballots were sent to and collected from at-home voters by…

At first, “The Freedman’s Memorial” 10-page workbook and teacher’s supplement looks harmless enough. A kid is depicted on the cover with his hand on his chin, head cocked, looking up thoughtfully. Inside, the books have drawings of old Dallas and a description of the long-vanished black community known as Freedman’s…

Steven Spiritas, chief executive officer of Supreme Beef, still works in the office above what just two years ago was his family’s thriving ground-beef plant in Fair Park. The plant below him is darkened, with most beef-grinding and other equipment sold as part of a bankruptcy. The U.S. Department of…

The Reverend Charles Wilkerson fell to the floor at the bottom of the staircase. He clutched his chest and curled into the fetal position. The Eastlake Christian School and Daycare investor and church pastor was having a heart attack. Or so it seemed. Administrators ran down the school hallway to…

Joe Harvey had just arrived at his job at the Dallas Zoo in early September when a co-worker called him over to look inside a cardboard box. “She was kind of like, ‘You are not going to believe what I found here,'” Harvey says. She was right. He didn’t believe…

Luther “L.J.” Lee looks out toward the interstate highway just north of Roanoke and to the Texas Motor Speedway beyond. As a younger man, he borrowed $25,000 to buy the land here, where he once farmed and where he stands in worn leather tennis shoes and blue jeans. He grew…

Dallas officials said they were “surprised” and angered last month because the decades-old aquarium in Fair Park was jilted by the national zoo and aquarium association. But, the truth is, the aquarium has been deteriorating and cash-strangled for more than a decade. The only surprise seems to be that it…

Alvin Kelly leans forward and folds his hands together on the white table in front of him. From behind a plastic window, the 50-year-old Kelly, with black hair speckled gray and dark circles under his eyes, looks sympathetic, sincere and innocent. He’s not injecting methamphetamine or stealing from anyone anymore…

The advertisements on the back of DART buses displayed a photograph of a cherubic child and asked, “Is it wrong to feed a Palestinian child?” Hmm. No, that wouldn’t be wrong, but sending the money as a reward to families of Palestinian suicide bombers might be, and some Dallas motorists…

Beef industry insiders say that the federal government has backed away from a stringent new meat-inspection policy that a local beef producer claims forced his company into bankruptcy last year. Dallas’ Supreme Beef, which once provided one-fourth of the nation’s ground beef for school lunches, challenged in court the U.S…

The temperature approached 100 degrees, but the hundreds of children and parents stood firm in a sweaty and noisy three-block-long line outside KD Studio in Dallas. The children were all trying to land a role in the upcoming season of Barney & Friends, the long-running program on public television. The…

When the public complained about how animals were being cared for at the city’s educational farm located north of Dallas, the city’s park department responded. It got rid of most of the animals. When the public complained about how the horses at Samuell Farm’s privately operated trail ride were being…

Administrators at Trinity Medical Center in Carrollton just wanted the grackles out of the pear trees. The sometimes annoyingly loud crowlike birds were defecating on the cars in the parking lot and sidewalks. It wasn’t a health issue; the falling poop was just a smelly nuisance and a mess, says…

Jan Bynum stands at the center of her daughter’s room in Bynum’s Farmers Branch house and looks around. On one wall is a University of North Texas calendar from the 1997-1998 academic year. Other parts of the room are filled with her daughter’s furniture, makeup and knickknacks, much as the…

From the backseat of the single-engine airplane, Carmen Rivera-Worley watched uncomfortably as the 25-year-old pilot tapped his finger on an illuminated blue instrument. Raindrops streaked the plane’s windows as it raced at about 120 mph through a blanket of ink-black clouds west of New Orleans. Then, Rivera-Worley and the two…

For Cheryl Bass, it all started when she and her husband, Robert, sat down to sign papers for their new house. They were first-time homebuyers, and they had patiently waited about six months for construction on their nearly $200,000 dwelling to be done. The house was beautiful, and they were…

“The scriptures have said, ‘The things that have been done in the dark will be known from the house tops.'”–Civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer Up a dirt road about a mile south of the small North Texas town of Ladonia, the men came. It was past midnight, but a…

A toddler stretches his arms out over his head and puts both hands on the front glass of an aquarium. Behind the glass, a dozen or so baby chicks are bathed in the warm orange and yellow glow of a heat lamp. The chicks scurry toward the glass, delighting the…

Jason January, a Dallas County special prosecutor until he suddenly and inexplicably quit in October, accumulated some impressive photographs during the last couple of years. There’s the one where January’s arm is around Peter Jennings’ shoulder at Jennings’ ABC News office in New York City and one of January on…

Supreme Beef Processors, the Dallas company that went bankrupt while fighting the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has won another court victory over the government’s right to enforce stringent new meat-testing standards. Critics say the new standards, designed to detect pathogens in meat such as salmonella and E. coli, are unfair…