When the Sandy Hook school shootings occurred in December 2012, Jason Villalba had one toddler and one child in kindergarten. Like all parents, Villalba felt an urgent need to offer better protection for his kids. Unlike most parents, Villalba had just been elected to his freshman term in the Texas…
After being swept at home by the Houston Astros (!), your Texas Rangers now own the worst record in baseball. Suffering through injuries and errors, they’ve been at a total loss, with no solutions, nothing to ease the pain, nowhere to turn. Until now. Catcher Geovany Soto was arrested in…
Ju Weng and Yu Con Weng are two brothers who have been living the dream life in Dallas, reaping the benefits of a very successful start-up business. The two have built a veritable Chinese buffet empire throughout the area: Together, they own and manage the Yes Buffet, Crown Buffet, Win…
The prison-based Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is a hierarchical organization, with leaders exerting lots of power over their subordinates. The group breaks the state up into five regions, based on the prison system, and the generals of each region are the top-dog. They appoint two majors, one on the inside…
Michael O’Connor used Motherless.com much like other people use Facebook. He set up a profile, messaged other users and uploaded pictures. The pictures, though, were not of him. In May, O’Connor came across a profile he liked. It was of a 31-year-old woman who listed her interests as incest and…
The money was stashed in a secret compartment in her car door. Silvia Flores, a middle-aged woman, was on the Gateway of the Americas Bridge, trying to cross from Laredo into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. She was stopped, and in her secret compartment was more than $100,000. The 2009 incident didn’t…
Damon McClendon has been in this spot before. For the second time in less than five years, the North Texas man was arrested for spending counterfeit U.S. currency. The first time around, in 2008 and 2009, McClendon was a participant in a ring that created non-legal tender created using an…
Dallas County Judge Roberto Cañas has a grim job: He presides over a county criminal court that specifically sees domestic violence cases. While Cañas does not hear felony cases, he sees plenty people come through his court whom he worries would be more than capable of more violent acts. This…
Community leaders in Oak Cliff’s Elmwood neighborhood are happy that an illegal casino has been crippled by the Dallas Police Department, after they spent months putting up with nuisances and threats from it and its patrons. Elmwood residents first noticed something out of the ordinary was going on at the…
Christopher Key seems to have set the ball rolling. Last week, his lawyer filed a lawsuit claiming his boss, Neil Chopra, at a Carrollton janitorial services company sexually harassed him by punching him in the testicles and, one time, stun-gunning him in the groin. On Monday, three more employees filed…
Jonathan Holden did not meet a good end. He suffered from psychotic episodes, delusions and paranoid schizophrenia. He used meth. About two years ago, because he broke into a car to escape a cold night, he found himself in a high-risk unit of a jail in Fort Worth. One day,…
For 25 years, people arrested in Dallas County but not sure why have been protected under more or less the same rule. Dallas cops have three whole business days to figure out what to charge an arrested person with and get the paperwork in, not including the day you were…
Total Building Maintenance, Inc., in Carrollton, is in the business of cleanliness. For its corporate clients, it cleans carpets and washes windows, among other janitorial duties. But if a new lawsuit filed recently is to be believed, the company, especially its chief operations officer, Neil Chopra, has been engaged in…
Ranji Charles, a Dallas man implicated in two early Sunday morning murders in southern Dallas, is in critical condition at Methodist Central Hospital, police say. Charles is alleged to have been riding in a car with two men — Corey Shannon and Elliot Byes — when the trio pulled into…
Of all the things that one thinks might derail a trainee cop’s trip through the academy, an allergy isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Mishandling a weapon or failing a drug test, sure, but not an allergy. But in a lawsuit filed in Dallas County late last week,…
As Nicole Guerrero lay alone in a cell, moaning and crying in excruciating pain through the birth of her daughter, she heard the detention officers laugh, she says. “What are y’all going to do with her?” they said, according to a lawsuit Guerrero filed recently against Wichita County. Later, she…
Texas, as you may have intuited, is hot, but Texas prisons, as you may have heard, are hotter. Since 2007, 14 inmates, including nine in 2011 alone, have died from heat-related illnesses, according to a 2014 report from UT Law School’s Human Rights Clinic. Larry McCollum’s death received most of…
In this week’s Dallas Observer we profile 20 of the metro area’s most interesting characters, with new portraits of each from local photographer Can Turkyilmaz. See the entire Dallas Observer People Issue here. Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t need to be told there was unrest. The barest recitation of…
Kolten Parker/San Antonio Express-News via Washington Post For the last week or so, as America’s mayors and well-heeled urbanists descended on our fair burg, we have touted ourselves as the bonafide Florence in Texas, a cultural oasis in a vast desert of philistines. Well, kind of. Turns out we still…
Cloyd Ray Knight III had a great run. He began to perfect a process to make phony $100 bills in 2004, operating what amounted to a small print shop out of his Arlington home. Knight began by applying a layer of acrylic paint to newspaper print paper. Then he would…
Back in 2006, William Clark Perschman robbed 18 banks in Dallas. He would put a T-shirt over his head to conceal his identity, and it earned him the less-than-stellar nickname of “T-Shirt Bandit.” He was caught and went to federal prison. Five years later, he was released on a supervised…
Back in 2005, a woman, living on disability in Chicago, was contacted online by a man, he apparently as lonely as she. He promised to marry her, said he could cure her health woes, according to the case laid out by prosecutors. Before they could be together, though, he told…
