For eight years, Sheldrick Newton worked a menial job at Dallas’ Central Library while harboring larger ambitions. “I am a very talented person and can fit just about any part,” he wrote in his ExploreTalent.com profile. “[M]ost people see me as a person who could possibly put a movie or…
Over winter break during the 2007-08 school year, Robert Lange, then a social studies teacher at Williams High School in Plano, twice had sex with a high school student at a martial arts studio. The girl was 18, the sex was consensual, and she wasn’t his pupil but a student…
Folks in Oak Cliff have been pushing for an Oak Cliff dog park for a while now. More specifically, they’ve been lobbying the city to pitch in for a permanent one, since they have the pop-up thing down by now. Yesterday brought good news. According to a post on FIDO…
A few weeks ago, one of the digital billboards on I-30 leading west into downtown flashed a message congratulating Sarah Colmark on a successful first year at WRR 101.1 FM, Dallas’ classical music radtio station. Colmark was hired as general manager last January, nearly a full two years after the…
To say that rocker/maniac Ted Nugent is not a fan of Barack Obama would be something of an understatement. Take this quote, which he screamed to fans at a concert while brandishing a pair of machine guns: “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk,”…
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Dallas ISD police Chief Craig Miller wasted no time in dismissing the thought of arming teachers. In fact his recommendations for making DISD students safer, which he will present to the Board of Trustees at a briefing on Thursday, involve…
On Saturday night, a few minutes before 8 p.m., 20-year-old Shatara Robinson was walking from the CityPlace DART station to a restaurant on McKinney Avenue, where she was planning to meet family for dinner. She was on the sidewalk when she was approached by Rodney Jones, a wild-haired 46-year-old dressed…
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the guns-in-schools debate in Texas has focused on teachers: whether to arm them; what training they should receive; whether it’s better to shoot or ask questions first; etc. But limiting the use of firearms on campus to trained, presumably…
At 4 a.m., an Officer Zane Murray with the Dallas Police Department spotted two men along Stemmons Freeway loading bridge-building materials — $6,400 in large aluminum plates and overhang brackets belonging to Archer Western, a TxDOT contractor — from a construction site into the bed of their 18-year old Dodge…
Stacey Hargraves was pulling in $300 per week from his job in the sanitation department at Mary Kay, but it never seemed to stretch far enough to support his wife, children and his propensity to gamble and go to sporting events. And so, according to the FBI, he walked into…
When Dallas County commissioners meet on Tuesday, they will decide whether to part with a rather unusual piece of county property: a black, 75-pound pot-bellied pig. The swine, identified only by his serial number, 12-167125, is being kept at the Kennedy Livestock Center outside Hutchins, where the county stables stray…
In November, Mayor Mike Rawlings took a stroll down Bishop Avenue to inaugurate its status as a complete street, the term of art for roadways designed as much to welcome pedestrians, cyclists and small-scale retail as to accommodate cars. It was a consummation of sorts of the city’s prolonged flirtation…
By now, it’s barely recognizable as a piece of art: an eight-foot-tall ribbon of rusted steel scrawled with obscene graffiti, running through an obscure stretch of grassland on the eastern edge of downtown. It fades into the background now, ignored by commuters and passersby. That wasn’t the original vision when…
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, a half hour before he was scheduled to deliver a 1 p.m. speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. The words were never passed Kennedy’s lips, but the speech survived and, a month later, was printed and bound into…
Yesterday, the city of Dallas presented its new vision for downtown Dallas parks. As the Morning News pointed out, the plan calls for the amount of green space in and around the Central Business District to roughly double over the next several years. That includes four “priority parks” — Pacific…
The folks at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science are excellent at putting together infotaining science exhibits. They are not so good at handling a minor PR challenge. That much became clear when, on December 30, a museum patron was injured. A week later, pressed by the Morning News,…
When SMU announced in April that it had hired Larry Brown, the only man to have coached teams to both the NCAA and NBA championships, to lead the Mustangs, a lot of head-scratching ensued. It was hard to fathom why SMU would put its basketball program in the hands of…
Larry Lake and his wife, Kathy, were living a comfortable life in the Dallas suburbs until October 2010, when federal agents abruptly descended on their Colleyville home and left with some $6 million in cash. The money, it seems, was legit, simply the revenue from Lakes’ companies, namely Grapevine Drug…
It’s T-minus three hours until all hell breaks loose at City Hall, as the Plan Commission meets to decide whether to let Trinity East Energy drill for natural gas in Dallas parkland, and things are already starting to simmer. Case in point is a letter sent this week to Mayor…
You’ll remember David Womble as the charming Dallas County maintenance supervisor who, according to several former jail employees, once donned a set of fake gold teeth during a meeting with subordinates, said something to the effect of “This is how we do it in the ‘hood,” and began to strut…
Sheila Stanmore buried her husband, Kevin, in May 2008 after he was killed in a standoff with Grand Prairie Police. At least, she thought she buried him. But what she and the couple’s three daughters laid to rest at Community Missionary Baptist Church in Desoto wasn’t quite what she thought…
In 2005, Texas voters considered adding an amendment to the state constitution declaring that marriage “shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman” and forbidding any formal recognition of same-sex unions ratified elsewhere. The measure, controversial only insomuch as some conservatives feared that the language of…
