Dallas Observer staff writer Christine Biederman has been named a winner of the Dallas Bar Association’s Stephen H. Philbin Award for her February 25, 1999, story “Lost in translation,” which details the controversy surrounding Spanish-language interpreters in the Dallas County courts. Biederman uncovered evidence that the county’s main contractor for…
If there is still such a thing as a war on drugs in Texas, then one of its last skirmishes is unfolding in the trenches at New Place, a drug treatment center that operates amid a pocket of vacant lots in Old East Dallas. On this Thursday evening, the addicts…
Ed Burleson is one of them folks who can’t help but be country — and, more than that, Texas country. You could say it’s in his blood, type TX-positive. A sixth-generation Texan, he’s the direct descendant and namesake of Gen. Edward Burleson, a commander at the Battle of San Jacinto…
Paid endorsement It must have warmed Mayor Pro Tem Mary Poss’ heart: Just three weeks after she wrote a column for The Dallas Morning News’ editorial page announcing that the city’s streets were in better shape than anyone who actually drives might think, the paper published a letter filled with…
If publisher Gary Turner expects to get rich from Crime and Politics, he’ll have to try harder. Only one of the handful of mid-afternoon, weekday shoppers at Albertson’s on Midway and Northwest Highway had ever heard of it, even though a yellowing stack of the free neighborhood newspaper with the…
In the spring of 1970, as a prospective middle-round National Football League draftee, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare. On a practice field somewhere, between two blocking dummies, I faced a monstrous offensive tackle who sat poised and quivering in his stance. To the tackle’s left, on the far…
On July 19, three carloads of armed officers from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived at the small Fort Worth house that 23-year-old Quy Ngoc Tran and his family share with their cousin, Ann. In front of his wife and two young sons, officers arrested Tran and put him…
Make nice It sounded like a right honorable thing to do: District Attorney Bill Hill, still in his rookie year, told The Dallas Morning News he was dustin’ off his trial boots this week and gettin’ back into the courtroom. He claimed he was just living up to the campaign…
It lasted, at most, two or three seconds. Enough time to send and receive a million impulses that ripped through her mind like neural buckshot. They are stuck there today, two years later, as memories, and Elise Thompson can feel them viscerally; she recalls the sounds, sights, and sensations as…
They began noticing the symptoms only days after the explosion. Bronchitis. Asthma. Sleeplessness. Nausea. Trouble breathing. Surely, they thought, it must be the gas. Bill Smith has no doubt he can prove that the butane gas leak and pipeline explosion near his home in rural Kaufman County three years ago…
In a small, nondescript room in Charter Hospital in Plano, a disheveled, glassy-eyed woman rocks in a chair as she speaks in a little girl’s voice to her therapist. At this moment, 33-year-old Martha Hurt believes she is a 12-year-old girl named Mawsa, whose parents made her do unspeakable things…
L.M. Kit Carson founded the USA Film Festival in 1970 for one reason: He needed a place to show his movie. Two years earlier, Carson and director Jim McBride had made David Holzman’s Diary, a dazzling mockumentary starring Carson as a moviemaker determined to discover The Big Truth by capturing…
The lunch served at the daylong meeting last August was nothing to brag about. “It was just your standard chicken lunch,” recalls Rosemarie Allen, who was, at the time, one of three associate superintendents in the Dallas school district. Yet the meal was part of a pricey gathering arranged by…
The truth shall set you free Seems Dallas Independent School District superintendent and chief hatchet man Bill Rojas is quick to learn how we do things in Dallas. Taking his cues right out of Mayor Ron Kirk’s playbook, Rojas has figured out how to quiet his critics: by making them…
Community activist Sharon Boyd, who led an unsuccessful campaign against giving tax dollars to the city’s new sports arena, has filed suit to have the arena group’s special tax exemptions declared illegal. Her suit argues the arena project does not match up with state law on who should get tax…
When some people stress out, they take a bubble bath among dimly lit candles. Or strum a familiar tune on a guitar, or shoot some hoop. Then there’s Colby Watkins, who lives in Austin. When the 24-year-old and his former girlfriend ended their relationship, he went to Robert-Michael and asked…
Porn may be going mainstream on the coasts, but a couple of recent obscenity busts in Dallas make it clear that isn’t about to happen here. Dallas, true to its Saturday night-Sunday morning moral compass, is as schizophrenic as ever in its approach to skin. It consumes porn in vast…
Untitled Executive assistant police chief Willard Rollins, one of the most unloved leaders in the department, finally did something to win affection from at least two of his fellow commanders — even if he didn’t mean to. When Rollins persuaded a state judge last week to give him back the…
When the time comes for historians to reflect on the decade of the ’90s, one of the troubling issues they will face is the headline-grabbing litany of violence that all too regularly has visited unlikely places. Misguided outcasts sprayed lethal gunfire into schools in Pearl, Mississippi; Littleton, Colorado; and West…
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had taken every precaution to guarantee that escape artist Steven Russell stayed where he belonged: behind bars. State prison authorities had placed him in administrative segregation; they denied him trusty status; they even refused all media requests to allow him to be interviewed. But…
Sarge says he spends most days at his “duty station.” The tall, gentle-sounding man appears to be talking about a single metal folding chair parked under a scraggly hackberry tree a block south of Dallas City Hall, just out of reach of the withering sun. But he is also clearly…
There he stands, in grainy, jerky images resembling an old home movie. Captured on rough film is George W. Bush in a line of Cub Scout troops, then posing for snapshots with boys clad in Little League baseball uniforms. More footage follows him out of an airport building marked “Davenport,…
