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…
A hacker using the handle “Guccifer” hacked the email accounts of several members of the Bush family, including the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, Bush 43’s sister. Among the leaked information are a lot of home numbers and addresses for Bush family members and their kids, and two pictures…
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…
Texas parents beware: your children are being “imperiled” by “abortion peddlers” who want to teach them “sex education.” No. No, they’re not. Although at some point someone might want to teach them to put a condom on a banana, and conservative lawmakers, predictably, want to make damn sure that person’s…
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,…
The Dallas Plan Commission voted to delay any decision on permitting natural gas wells in the Trinity River floodplain, telegraphing a clear message Thursday to City Council: Your move. Commissioner Gloria Tarpley remains none too pleased about being asked to consider a permit that currently runs afoul of city code’s…
So here’s what happened. Dallas-based SCA Promotions, a sports insurer, paid Lance Armstrong a $12 million bonus for winning three Tour de France titles between 2002 and 2004. Tailwind Sports, which owned the U.S. Postal Service (Armstrong’s) team, gave SCA Promotions $200,000 as insurance for the bonus. If Armstrong didn’t…
So Mayor Mike Rawlings responded, sort of, to Schutze’s post this morning about City Manager Mary Suhm’s double-super-secret letter of understanding with gas drilling company Trinity East, in which she promised the city’s staff would do its level best to get the company the permits it needs to drill on…
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…
Over the past few months, we’ve brought you sporadic updates on Cody Wilson, a UT Austin law student who heads up a group called Defense Distributed. They want to make a printable gun, an ambition that’s brought much hand-wringing and even got their rented 3-D printer repo-ed back in October…
Opponents of Trinity East’s plan to drill for natural gas inside the Trinity River floodplain say Plan Commission Chair Joe Alcantar of pressing his fellow commissioners outside of public meetings or lawful closed-door deliberations to reconsider the permit. In a complaint filed with the District Attorney’s public integrity division Wednesday,…
Documents released yesterday evening by the city reveal that Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm signed a side deal with a gas-drilling company five years ago to help the company win drilling rights on city parkland, even though she had assured the City Council and park board that drilling on parkland…
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…
