Because special forces training is hard. Because ground-based gunfire just isn’t sufficiently soaked in testosterone. Because helicopters. Because this is Texas, goddammit. There have always been plenty of reasons for your average (non-G.I.) Joe to shoot assault weapons from a moving aircraft. What North Texas males have lacked is a…
Sam Lee Morris was still alive when police found him. The disabled 61-year-old was laying unconscious in the road at the intersection of Sunnyvale and Cummings Street in Southeast Oak Cliff just before 10 p.m. Saturday night, having apparently been hit by a car. That’s what officers suspected, at least,…
When Joshua ISD officials cut off Remington Reimer’s valedictory speech, we thought it unlikely that it had anything to do with his mention of God. After all, district officials didn’t seem concerned later in the ceremony when another student delivered a prayer, punctuated by a lengthy recitation of scripture and…
More than a year after its fight became public, Dallas ISD is still struggling to cut ties with unscrupulous tutoring companies it’s required to contract with under federal law. A report set to be delivered Thursday to the board of trustees details the Texas Education Agency’s findings against two firms,…
Exile Machine makes no bones about the fact that its primary reason for existing is to skirt California gun laws. The Irving gun manufacturer’s name is a reference to its CEO, who it says lived and worked in California for most of the past 40 years. The first product the…
Kendric Littles, 33, almost made it home safely last night. Just before 1 a.m., he was headed back to his Oak Cliff home when, less than a block from his house, he came upon a blue 2012 Hyundai parked in the middle of the street. The car was blocking the…
Fisherman from the area have known the pond for decades. Tucked away in the Joppa Preserve in South Dallas, its official, government name is West Pond, but locals refer to it as Bad Leg Fred Lake after the man who once ran a small operation selling bait and supplies to…
When the State Fair of Texas abruptly fired Bill Bragg after 11 years as the voice of Big Tex, they chalked it up to a contract dispute and spoke of making a fresh start after last fall’s tragic fire. The real reason, however, was never far from the surface: Fair…
In a weekend story previewing the City Council’s discussion today on single-use plastic bags, the Dallas Morning News ran a photo of a tattered Kroger bag snagged on a barbed wire fence, downtown Dallas looming as a backdrop. “What I want to hear is who’s going to go get these…
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: A business or property owner buys a burglar alarm then pays the city for a permit. When there’s a burglar, police show up and make an arrest. If there are four or more false alarms in a year, the alarm owner is charged a…
We had assumed, back when Dallas police first floated their proposal to crack down on “spontaneous encampments,” that the measure was a delayed response to Occupy Dallas. Turns out, we were wrong. “This is not toward a specific group at all,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told the City Council’s…
A week ago Sunday, Charles Lee Johnson, 46, parked his wheelchair next to the Little World Food Store on Malcolm X Boulevard and began asking passing customers for money. A store employee, unable to persuade Johnson to leave, called police, who shooed the 46-year-old away and issued a criminal trespass…
According to Wycliffe, the global authority of Bible translation, the complete scriptures have been rendered in some 518 languages and dialects as of 2012. There’s a Bible in every language you can name, plus hundreds that you can’t. Speakers of Esperanto have their own version, and Klingons soon may. In…
Councilwoman Angela Hunt and former mayor Tom Leppert have never exactly been besties. She was a frequent and vocal critic of the mayor, accusing him of lying, putting his ambitions for higher office before the interests of the city, and generally not doing a very good job running the city…
A number of facts surrounding Donny Hinshaw’s May 23 arrest by Cleburne police are firmly established. Minutes before the YouTube clip above, the 30-year-old had gotten in a wreck and driven away. When he’s pulled over, he steps out of his truck and ignores the officer’s command to put his…
Remington Reimer’s classmates at Joshua High School called him “Spock” — less, it seems, due to any lack of human emotion than because he’s whip-smart. The Cleburne Times-Review referred to him recently as the “most gifted, academically excellent student that Joshua High School has ever produced,” which would explain how…
When the City Council voted in January to supply the Dallas Police Department with license plate scanners that automatically check vehicles against a law enforcement database, the decision was nearly unanimous. Most council members viewed it as a useful crime-fighting tool and little more. Only Angela Hunt expressed any serious…
At first, Jamie Lamont Jones told police he couldn’t have fired the shots. He’d been lying in bed in a back room when it happened, the same spot he’d been for days. Surely the officers could see that someone in his condition — paralyzed from the waist down and missing…
Taking a charge in basketball is an art, and it has been for a long time. A not-insignificant portion of high school basketball practices — at least as of a decade ago — are dedicated to training players on coming to an abrupt stop, setting one’s feet just so, and…
To be clear, burning the American flag is perfectly legal. The Supreme Court has ruled in two cases that igniting Old Glory is a form of speech and thus can’t be abridged by the government, no matter how much Congress might like to. Outstanding traffic tickets, on the other hand,…
The weather on Tuesday afternoon was pleasant, so Myretha Clark, 86, decided to spend it outside, chatting with her South Dallas neighbors. They’d been visiting for the better part of two hours when, at about 6:30 p.m., she declared that she was tired and was going home. A younger neighbor…
The postings on fired 911 operator April Sims’ Facebook account speak for themselves. When you write things like, “Black people are outrageous! They are more like animals,” there’s just not a lot of gray area there. But WFAA’s Rebecca Lopez, who co-broke the original story with The Dallas Morning News’…
