The old cotton gin on the west edge of Gunter seems an odd place to launch an economic boom. A breeze blows through broken windows and holes in its rusting, corrugated metal walls. Inside, a half-dozen or so squat machines that once separated cotton from seed sit corroding in a…
Jan Bynum sits at her dining-room table, wondering if today will be the day that her daughter Kelli Cox is found. It’s something she’s been wondering every day since her daughter went missing in the middle of an afternoon in July 1997 somewhere between the Denton Police Department and the…
The last thing the state of Texas’ Republican leadership wants to do is give in and accept the Medicaid expansion mandated by the Affordable Care Act. Texas has the highest uninsured population in the country, but no matter how many Texans might receive access to healthcare if the state would…
Three years ago this month, Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett were on a late-night patrol in South Dallas when they noticed a man behind Kwick Stop Liquor, later identified as 51-year-old Fred Bradford, riding his bicycle without a helmet and generally looking furtive. Burgess pulled behind Bradford…
Thursday, the Dallas Police Department announced that they were looking for a man who “stripped completely naked, began to masturbate, exposed his anus to the victim and then fled on foot,” from a Dallas construction site on Tuesday, April 5. The next day, the man returned to the construction site:…
Before dying at the hospital from self-inflicted stab wounds, McCann Utu Jr. told police he was murderer. The 19-year-old told a police dispatcher that he’d “committed murder” and “killed them,” Plano police said Friday, after he is believed to have stabbed his mother, Stacy Fawcett, and his 17-year-old brother Josiah Utu to death…
Just south of the Trinity River Audubon Center, across a footbridge and down a concrete trail that snakes along an east-west jaunt of the river, you’ll come to what was once one of Steve Smith’s favorite spots in the Great Trinity Forest. “Go into the [Google Earth] aerial photos from…
State troopers and Dallas County sheriff’s deputies will help the Dallas Police Department serve domestic violence and drug warrants, Dallas Police Chief David Brown and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings announced Thursday. The goal is cutting off the source of a recent increase in violent crime in the city. Last week,…
The easiest takeaway from the revised plan for the private takeover of Fair Park is that it isn’t going to cost the city quite as much as was initially thought. In November, when Ray Hunt buddy and “father of DART” Walt Humann first told the City Council how much the…
Congratulations, Dallas citizen, on your recent decision to examine the nuts-and-bolts operations of your local law enforcement agency(s)! A well-informed citizenry is vital functioning of democracy and, as we all know, crime stats is a particularly dusky corner of local government. Your thirst for knowledge and community spirit are a…
Since the Affordable Care Act became effective, nearly a million previously uninsured Texans have acquired health insurance. That’s good, but despite the gains, Texas still has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country and the highest raw number of uninsured residents. Gains in Texas have come at a…
The deadline, May 4, set by the city to clear the Dallas homeless encampment known as Tent City was not hard and fast. That much is clear after Wednesday’s Dallas City Council meeting. Adam Medrano desperately wants to get rid of Tent City. His district — which covers the Cedars…
The water Brenda Delgado is swimming in just got a lot hotter. Following the murder of Dallas dentist Kendra Hatcher, Delgado, 33, was quickly identified as the alleged mastermind behind the killing. Hatcher’s boyfriend at the time of her death was Delgado’s ex. Police say that Delgado, steaming with jealousy,…
Dallas has an affordable housing problem. The city has too little of it and what it does have is largely contained to southern Dallas. Affordable housing doesn’t venture north of Interstate 30 in Dallas unless it’s coaxed. For example, when the city wanted the Trammel Crow company to put 10…
Jeffrey Handy, the guy promoting Exxxotica porn conventions under the name J Handy, says in a new court filing that Dallas knew exactly what it was getting into when it allowed the porn convention to come to the city’s convention center last summer. Nevertheless, the City Council banned Handy and…
Is there another Dallasite who has made the national news as often as Dr. Robert Jeffress this year? The 60-year-old pastor of 12,000-member Dallas First Baptist has become the most prominent evangelical leader supporting Donald Trump, earning him rebukes from other church leaders, such as when he commented last month…
If we ever needed proof, we got it when Donald Trump opened his mouth at Liberty University and made his infamous reference to “2 Corinthians.” After wiping off the drool from laughing so hard, evangelicals knew with certainty that he was not one of us. Every American evangelical spanning the…
For a long time, each of the Observer’s online sections has had its own Facebook page except for the news section, or what was once called Unfair Park, may it rest in peace. News restricted itself to the Observer’s main page, drawing weird looks from those who came for the…
Plane spotters and aviation workers around Dallas Love Field Airport are always on the lookout for new aircraft. Last week SevenMikeCharlie took to Reddit to note a unique military arrival. “I created this post because I recently saw a new P-8 Poseidon arrive at Love Field,” he wrote, sparking a…
Maybe it’s just verbal jujitsu. Maybe, when Greg Hardy, as he did Monday, says that he’s never laid a hand on a woman, he means just that — that he’s never laid a hand on a woman in the way that your uncle’s congregation lays hands on members who’ve gone…
On the surface everything always looks so sober and important at City Hall, following a solemn script as if every subcommittee meeting were a medical school graduation ceremony or the funeral of an important person. And then you get these bizarre little windows on what’s really going on. Yesterday I…
Neil Emmons, Dallas’ District 2 plan commissioner who died last week, was way deep in the woods on some big development deal many years ago, on the side of the neighborhood and giving the developer grief, of course, when a guy I knew who worked for the developer gave me…
