Monday afternoon, the same day Governor Rick Perry announced a statewide advertising campaign to combat human trafficking, Dallas’ Dereck Johnson pleaded guilty to that offense in United States District Court. According to court documents, on June 1, 2012, Johnson lured a 15-year-old girl away from the Downtown Dallas Greyhound Station…
Open Carry Texas and its most active local offshoot, Open Carry Tarrant County, have succeeded marvelously in their quest to mercilessly troll gun-control advocates. Whether they’ve made any progress toward their stated aim of legalizing openly carried handguns in Texas, however, is another matter. The National Rifle Association, for one,…
Local chef Kent Rathbun has a very practical reason for driving a neon yellow Porsche. “Everyone knows it’s you,” he told The Dallas Morning News a couple of years ago. “That’s a good thing and a bad thing, actually. Part of the reason I like it is because when it’s…
Squad Car Footage from Amy Silverstein on Vimeo. The allegations against the former McKinney Police Department officer are serious: He was driving too fast, with no siren lights on and making a dangerous lane change before crashing into the car of a man who is now suing him. But there’s…
Before Open Carry Tarrant County members and their rifles set foot in a Fort Worth Jack in the Box earlier this month, setting off a series of increasingly absurd showdowns between open-carry gun activists and national restaurant chains, its members were standing on Arlington sidewalks handing out copies of the…
If nothing else, you can at least say this about former state trooper Kelly Helleson: she proved quite willing to go above and beyond the call of duty. That was the case anyways on the night of July 13, 2012, when she helped a colleague with a traffic stop along…
If, like us, you’ve been worried that discussions on substantive policy issues like home-rule and merit pay have distracted from Dallas ISD’s long and storied history of stupid penny-ante graft, then you’re in luck. Federal prosecutors have just brought charges against a former DISD employee who allegedly stole $162,000 through…
Something weird and unsettling happened last year at the Dallas County Sheriff’s Training Academy. Of 27 recruits that enrolled, a mere seven — barely 25 percent — passed on their first try. Weird because the wave of failures was unprecedented. The previous year, all 16 would-be deputies passed. Unsettling because…
Denton High School students were puzzled on Thursday when journalism teacher Greg Bogomol was ignominiously escorted from the building. They were soon tweeting about rumors “that something happened.” Rumors are slippery, unreliable things, as any high school journalism student can attest. Maybe they contain a nugget of truth. Lucky for…
There are good ways to handle a family dispute, and then there are bad ways, the ones that will inspire the prosecutor handling your case to send out a press release with the too-late reminder that “We are all told not to play with fire as small children.” Jeffrey Pruett,…
You can, provided you’re willing to break a handful of federal laws and international treaties and locate a willing buyer, sell a dead hummingbird. A well-preserved specimen of certain varieties will fetch upward of $350 on the U.S. black market, according to federal prosecutors. Who, you might wonder, would pay…
Most people have more or less forgotten the high-profile TCU drug bust of February 2012. Aside from the presence of four football players among the 18 arrested and the relatively rare chance for TV stations to run a mugshot gallery full of privileged college kids, the revelation that a bunch…
Shortly after Danny Cantu’s home was searched by Dallas police officers, he ended up in the hospital with trauma to his face. “Kicked in head,” read the notes in his medical records. He had been admitted with septal hematoma — bruising or bleeding in the nose — and lacerations on…
The criminal case against Columbia Packing and the Ondruseks, aka the Trinity River pig blood guys, sure seems like it should have been a slam dunk. How could investigators possibly botch a case in which there is literally a trail of blood leading directly to the suspected culprits? By trespassing,…
In September, Brice Johnson starting talking to Arron Keahey on MeetMe.com, a networking and dating app. Keahey’s profile said he was looking for other men. Johnson, a 19-year-old from Springtown (a half hour’s drive northwest of Fort Worth) indicated that he was straight in his own profile, but nonetheless started…
Update at 4:09 p.m.: The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals just stayed Campbell’s execution on the grounds that he may legally be mentally retarded/intellectually disabled. It is regrettable that we are now reviewing evidence of intellectual disability at the eleventh hour before Campbell’s scheduled execution. However, from the record before…
Rickey Dale Wyatt walked out of Judge John Creuzot’s Dallas courtroom on January 4, 2012, finally a free man. After 31 years in prison, his 1981 aggravated rape conviction was set aside after Creuzot and District Attorney Craig Watkins’ Conviction Integrity Unit agreed that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence at…
State District Judge Jeanine Howard quickly backtracked on her sentencing of a convicted rapist to volunteer at a rape crisis center after we called her office last week to ask what would happen if no rape crisis center wanted to accept him. “She’s going go back and modify those conditions…
There comes a time in any sustained protest movement when internal disagreements over tactics, over what ends justify what means, over the acceptability of compromise in the name of progress, reach a boiling point. It happened during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. It happened in the during the…
In late March, the parent of a high school cheerleader emailed a tip to the Observer. Last fall, she wrote, Dallas radiologist Dr. James Summa was arrested at a Mesquite High School football game and charged with improper photography for snapping pictures of underage girls. We confirmed the arrest with…
Earlier this week, the Dallas County District Attorney’s office mysteriously dropped all felony charges against Columbia Packing Co. and its vice president, Joseph Carl Ondrusek Jr., for dumping pig blood into a tributary of the Trinity River in January 2012. Counting last month’s dismissal of the charges against Donny Ondrusek…
On Tuesday, some 18 years after shooting 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent in the back and stuffing her body in a deep freezer, and three years after Jack Black played him in the Hollywood retelling, Bernie Tiede walked from a Carthage courtroom a free man. The former mortician, now 55, had been…
