This is what 13-year-old Taylor Storch left behind when she died in a skiing accident three years ago: a heart, which went on to beat in the chest of a 39-year-old mother in Arizona; two kidneys, which saved two separate people in Colorado; two corneas, which helped restore sight to…
Van Dralan Dixson, the man accused of raping as many as nine women in South Dallas in recent months, is sorry. He’s sorry that he raped a woman as she walked home from her job at at a fast-food chicken restaurant on September 1, then stole her cell phone, cash,…
Ted Cruz did not make the cover of the October issue of GQ, an honor reserved for The Wire’s Idris Elba. That’s probably for the best. The appearance of Texas’ junior senator on the cover of a national magazine, this one not a political rag but one that defines itself…
Claudia Yamell Castillo may not come out atop North Texas’ (unofficial) Most Hated Person list for September. With a week to go, that Balch Springs teen who beat a puppy’s eye out with a tree branch has to be the current favorite. But Castillo is a strong contender for runner…
Mulligan Mint is sort of like the companies that hawk gold coins through Sunday newspaper supplements and daytime cable TV, in that the money it produces isn’t legal tender, but the similarities end there. While the other companies play on the misty-eyed patriotism of octogenarians who still scour the ads…
Dallas County recently discovered its sixth person to test positive for the West Nile virus this year, in a season that’s seen one death. It’s a much less troubling situation than last year, when there were 400 human infections and 20 deaths. The Dallas Morning News has an easy explanation…
Last year, we brought you the story of Steve Lipsky, whose little slice of paradise in Parker County became a proxy in the war between the EPA and state regulators. It wasn’t long after Range Resources began stimulating a nearby natural gas well by hydraulic fracturing that Lipsky noticed his…
Every man has his limit, and Leonard Small reached his late Sunday night, somewhere between the apartment parking lot where he was picked up for public intoxication and the Dallas city jail. When officers ushered the 25-year-old out from the back of the paddy wagon, they noticed that his pants…
Evidence has been mounting for years that Tasers are more dangerous than their manufacturer and law enforcement officials, who tout the weapon as a nonlethal alternative to firearms, have claimed.Over the past dozen years, 540 people, most of them unarmed, have died after being tased by police, according to a…
In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez’s murder at the hands of a white Dallas police officer, the City Council pledged to “never allow such a travesty to reoccur.” It wasn’t a particularly bold statement. Promising to stop police officers from playing Russian roulette with unarmed children…
You are a governor of a big state. Someone just shot and killed more than a dozen people in the nation’s capital. Question: Should you tour a gun factory the next day? If you’re Rick Perry, the clear answer is yes. As part of his job-poaching tour in Maryland, he…
When the city broke ground on the $50 million Buckeye Trail Commons housing development, everyone grabbed a shovel. Never mind that they were all wearing business suits; this was supposed to be the beginning of a renaissance in the Bonton neighborhood that had until recently been burdened with the notorious…
For the most part, Americans have come to accept restaurant- and workplace-smoking bans. Even in freedom-loving Texas, most residents view them less as an encroachment on individual liberty than a reasonable measure to protect the health of nonsmokers, even if their politicians don’t. The alarmed cries of nanny-statism are now…
Following through his pledge to confront a changing climate, which an international body of scientists now says with 95 percent certainty is caused by human activity, President Barack Obama’s administration has announced limits on greenhouse gases emitted by power plants. Nearly half of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from…
Anyone who frequents the escort section of backpage.com probably already knows this. Ditto for anyone who has given much thought to how police vice units are adapting to an era in which much of the sex trade is orchestrated online. It bears mentioning nonetheless: The Dallas Police Department is posting…
If the Texas Department of Transportation were a private company, it would have long ago plastered “Don’t Mess With Texas” all over T-shirts, belt buckles, chastity belts, firearms, and any other consumer good its marketing department could call to mind. As it is, the state agency has mostly limited the…
Dallas police Sergeant Carlton Barnes knew the man the bulletin described. They had gone to school together years before. Now, in September 2011, his friend was a capital murder suspect. According to an internal affairs investigation, Barnes ran the memo by a fellow officer, another former classmate, who confirmed that…
A droll old English butler once told the Dark Knight that “some men just want to watch the world burn.” The ends they pursue aren’t coherent. Their objectives are inscrutable to rational men. They sow chaos, because it is a faith unto itself. Alfred was talking about the Joker, but…
We can’t make you unsee our post about Ricky Davis, the Fort Worth man who raped a 12-year-old family friend. What we can do instead is offer the heartwarming story of Dallas animal control officer Lee Pogue in hopes of balancing out some of the soul-killing negativity we just put…
Bobby Gazdzicki’s plan worked brilliantly for three months. According to federal court documents, he discovered in April 2011 that as long as he could get hold of a legit tracking number, he could call FedEx, pose as a Dell employee and have the shipping company reroute brand-new computers to whatever…
Ricky Davis had known the girl since she was a baby. He wasn’t quite her uncle, but he might as well have been. His brother fathered four of her siblings, and Davis was close with the family. On August 19, 2012, Davis and the girl’s family went to church together…
Each year, Allstate comes out with a list of America’s worst drivers, and each year, Dallas is puzzled to discover it doesn’t come out on top, an honor typically reserved for Washington, D.C. That’s not to say that drivers here aren’t terrible. In this year’s report, Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Irving,…
