In the predawn hours on Saturday, January 26, University of North Texas student Dustin Starks, 20, fell from the balcony of the Delta Sigma Phi fraternity house. He survived, but just barely. Nearly two weeks later, he remains at Parkland Hospital in serious condition. In the wake of the accident,…
For years, DART’s been planning to stick a second rail line downtown, the better to handle the convergence of what is now four separate rail lines. A three-year study was completed back in 2010, and the list of possible routes was whittled down to four alternatives, all traveling through Victory…
The Morning News sat down this morning for a jailhouse interview with Chung Kim, the 75-year-old charged with murdering his upstairs neighbors on Monday, and his version of events differs somewhat from the police’s narrative, which is that he became enraged when dog shit landed on his porch and hunted…
America, it seems, was waiting with bated breath this morning as the Boy Scouts of America board of directors, meeting in Irving, was expected to vote on ending its longstanding ban on gays. America will have to keep waiting. The organization announced this morning that the board has decided to…
When the first season of the revamped Dallas debuted in June, it was described in the trade press as a ratings gusher, pulling in a solid 6.9 million viewers. It seems that the ratings bonanza is now over. The show’s second season pulled in fewer than 3 million viewers, a…
Yesterday afternoon, at the mobile home they share on Lawson Road in the Rylie neighborhood of Dallas, 52-year-old Warren Miller and his wife began to argue. At issue, police say, was $20 that had been left in the living room. The argument escalated into something more serious when police say…
When Mike Miles was hired last year as superintendent of Dallas ISD, he was rewarded handsomely. His base salary of $300,000 per year put him near the top of the list of the state’s highest-paid superintendents. Meet all the metrics for his possible $200,000 annual bonus, and his place at…
Over the weekend, the Wise County Sheriff’s Department received a call unusual in the decidedly nontropical climes of North Texas: There was a monkey was the loose. Turns out, it wasn’t a monkey. It was a kinkajou. And deputies discovered that kinkajous don’t really like people, or anything else for…
In 2009, science-respecting members of the State Board of Education succeeded in scrubbing the state’s science curriculum standards of a requirement to discuss the “weaknesses” of evolution, which would have opened the gates to less scientific theories, namely intelligent design and creationism. But it wasn’t a wholesale victory, as Kathy…
The news technically broke two weeks ago when, buried in a Frontburner post about the Stars’ home opener, team officials mentioned that they might put an ice rink at Klyde Warren Park. But it wasn’t until yesterday that the Dallas Business Journal asked the obvious followup: Are you guys serious?…
In Dallas, geography is destiny. That’s the unavoidable conclusion from a recent study by Stand for Children, a Texas nonprofit, which crunched incarceration and college-preparedness rates in Dallas, ZIP code by ZIP code. “It became immediately obvious that a small number of zip codes send a lot more inmates to…
At 5:30 yesterday, a 13-year-old student at Dallas’ Anderson Middle School was at a Dixon Avenue apartment complex selling candy for a school fundraiser when she was grabbed by the neck from behind. The attacker, whom the girl identified as a seventh grader at Anderson, briefly choked her, then pulled…
Every day, my commute home takes me over the Hall Street overpass where, from the comfort (or, more accurately, mild discomfort) of my bike seat, I gaze down at the parking lot that is Central Expressway at rush hour and wonder with a mix of empathy and mild condescension what…
Chung Kim had lived below Jamie Stafford and Michelle Jackson at the Sable Ridge Apartments in Northeast Dallas for two years when witnesses and police say an ongoing dispute over noise — the 31-year-old couple had five children — and dog crap pushed Kim over the edge. At 8 a.m…
When the city released its master plan for downtown parks in 2004, the vision was to create “a series of signature parks within downtown that add identity and economic vibrancy to the heart of the city.” That’s starting to happen, as anyone who’s spent time in Main Street Garden or…
At around midnight last night, neighbors in the Dallas Power & Light building called police to complain of loud music coming from Kamiel Moore’s apartment. Officers pounded on the door several times before Moore opened it. They told her that neighbors were complaining about the noise and asked to see…
Last February, animal rights activists in South Carolina launched a small drone equipped with a camera to monitor a pigeon hunt on a private shooting plantation. The hunters promptly shot it down. The activists’ use of the drone seems to have been perfectly legal, but it’s relatively uncharted territory. Lawmakers…
The debate over whether Boy Scouts of America should allow gay members and volunteers will come to a head this week, as the organization’s board of directors descends on Irving for its regular meeting. They will be greeted by a full-page Human Rights Campaign ad in the Dallas Morning New…
In November 2010, Dallas voters firmly rejected the city’s plan to offload Elgin B. Robertson Park. The idea of selling the park, which occupies 257 acres on the shore of Lake Ray Hubbard, had been but on the ballot partly as a way to boost the Parks Department’s capital budget…
According to statistics kept by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there are several dozen licensed gun manufacturers in the state of Texas. Most of those are small-scale operations, individuals or mom-and-pop-style shops that produce one or two pistols or rifles in a year. A small handful –…
Last month, Jane Bryant finally lost her years-long fight with the city when demolition crews rolled in early one morning and made quick work of 604 Elsbeth S., better known as Lee Harvey Oswald’s old apartment. For a brief moment, the building, with its tangential connection to history, drew the…
The only halfway house in Dallas County occupies the cabana area of the luxury hotel-turned-county lockup on Stemmons Freeway. At any given time, the Bill Decker Detention Center houses 225 former Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmates, all sex offenders, trying to make the transition back to civilian life. Its…
