Five days after Yayehyirad Lemma and Yenenesh Desta dead on the front porch of their Marquita Street home, police have captured the suspected killer. Abey Bilette Girma, 37, fled to Colorado after allegedly following Lemma and Desta home early Wednesday morning and shooting them to death. According to an arrest…
For a time, Johar Saran was at the head of one of the largest prescription drug rings in the country. He claimed to own 22 pharmacies in the Dallas area, under cover of which he ordered tremendous quantities of in-demand prescription drugs (codeine cough syrup, for one) then used the…
A capital murder warrant has been issued for Abey Bilette Girma, 37, in the killing of the owners of Desta, an Ethiopian restaurant, at around midnight on Aug. 15. Yayehyirad Lemma and Yenenesh Desta were gunned down on the front porch of their home on Marquita Street after closing the…
Just after 8 o’clock this morning, I was riding to work, as I always do, along the Sante Fe Trail. I’d just passed Woodrow and was riding along the fields at Randall Park when I heard pop, pop on my left. It sounded like when a squirrel drops a half-eaten…
Google “Oak Farms reward” and you’ll get a lot of hits, recent news articles mostly with headlines like “Oak Farms offers $10,000 reward in murder of Arlington couple,” “Reward offered in hairdresser’s murder,” “Oak Farms Dairy offers reward in DART retiree murder.” Most recently, it was $10,000 for the arrest…
First, a word of caution. If someone cold-calls you, says they’re a police officer, then asks you to withdraw a large some of cash from the bank so they can see if it’s counterfeit, don’t do it. Chances are, they’re not actually a cop and you’re never going to find…
Update at 11:45 a.m.: Never mind. Police just retracted the $10,000 reward. “Detectives are working on potential information,” they said via news release, which I assume means they have a possible lead. Original post: Police still don’t know who shot 40-year-old Yayehyirad Lemma and 31-year-old Yenenesh Desta on the front…
Bad things began to happen to Terrence Hill around this time last year. His troubles began when he went to move into a new apartment but was instead given a totally different unit, one with broken air conditioning. His bad week, he says, escalated from there. By 7:30 a.m. on…
Last month, Texas’ prison population was right at 154,000, the lowest its been in five years. Lower crime rates, an aging population, and alternative treatments have all contributed to the decline. But as the Star-Telegram noted yesterday, the drop hasn’t been enough to spare Texas the dubious distinction of locking…
Amidst a cluster of Ethiopian businesses near Greenville Avenue and 635 sits Desta, “one of a few restaurants in Dallas with the patience” to make their own injera, the classic Ethiopian spongy bread, as our food critic wrote last year. It’s a process that takes a lot of work, so…
Media outlets in Chicago are reporting this morning that Brianna Gardner, a 22-year-old from Dallas, was fatally shot in the head in an upscale Chicago hotel. Gardner’s body was discovered in her seventh-floor room by the Whitehall Hotel housekeeping staff. One guest told the Chicago Tribune they heard a gunshot…
On paper, Allen Chiu seemed to be a very big Nordstrom fan. Over the course of 22 months starting in January 2010, the Dallasite and his brother Andrew of California ordered more than $23 million of merchandise through the upscale department store’s website. That won’t go as far at Nordstrom…
On the Dallas Police Department’s Facebook page this afternoon, Chief David Brown announced in a lengthy post measures to “positively impact officer safety and improve public trust and confidence.” The announcement comes in the wake of the July 24 shooting death of James Harper and a spate of other officer-involved…
At the corner of Corinth Street and Park Avenue, in a neighborhood of rundown homes and produce houses a stone’s throw from Heritage Village, is the old bakery Herschel Weisfeld bought 15 years ago to convert into a live-work space for artists. The apartment units are in the back and…
It wasn’t long ago that we found country singer Randy Travis drinking wine in front of the First Baptist Church in Sanger. But the man has topped himself. Pretty much everyone is now reporting that Travis walked naked into a Grayson County convenience store to buy cigarettes last night, crashed…
Lennie Small was the simple-minded field worker in Of Mice and Men who, in a moment of confused panic, inadvertently kills the wife of the boss’ son. He’s an iconic character in American literature, so iconic that Texas used him as a benchmark to help decide when it’s okay to…
A recent opinion out of a state appeals court in Dallas sheds no light on whether Scott Wiseman of Garland is a complete scumbag. It does, however, make one thing clear: Prosecutors, do not let your expert witnesses opine on the statistical likelihood that your victim is telling the truth…
Update at 12:34 p.m.: Police have identified the victim as 23-year-old Vilma Esperanza Alvarado. Original post: Early Sunday afternoon, about 1:15 p.m., officers were called to an empty warehouse parking lot at 7301 Ambassador Row, just off Stemmons, where they discovered the body of a Hispanic woman who had been…
Word came this morning that Dallas police were involved in yet another officer-involved shooting. This time, no one was shot. According to a police report, 50-year-old Luis Ramirez placed a $700 backpack leaf blower and other lawn care equipment on his apartment balcony to load into his truck for the…
Last month, the daughter of Larry Gene McCollum sued the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. McCollum was serving an 11-month sentence at Hutchins State Jail in Dallas last summer when, after days in a cell where the temperature neared triple digits, he had a seizure. He was taken to the…
WFAA is reporting that the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s office has just released their report on the fatal police shooting of James Harper, whose death brought hundreds of people out into the streets in protest last week. Many in the crowd believed Harper had been shot in the back. The…
Dallas police just sent word that they arrested 46-year-old Enio Cardoso Wissel for alleged indecency with an 8-year-old boy at Julia C Frazier Elementary School. Tawnell Hobbs at the Morning News has more. Wissell was a fine arts teacher with DISD from August 2011 until March 2012, when he was…
