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…
There is a YouTube clip, jerky and brief, posted by his mother, showing Wilmer-Hutchins High School’s Troy Causey Jr. going head-to-head against Madison’s Johnathan Turner. Causey opens the game with a put-back jam. Turner responds with one on the other end. Two months later, on March 23, Dallas police say…
Keller, with its exurban tangle of big, fast streets, is not the most wonderful place to be a pedestrian. Not even in its subdivisions. Just ask the family of Robert Lariz-Trinidad, who was run over by a pickup on Thursday while pushing a wheelbarrow across a street so quiet it…
By Saturday night, the members of New York’s Finest Baseball Club will be be back home in the Big Apple, a place where neighbors look out for one another and people respect respect private property. It’ll be a relief to escape from Dallas, where the team of New York City…
When the Star-Telegram finally pried a comment from Fort Worth veterinarian Millard “Lou” Tierce on Wednesday, he dismissed allegations that he’d mistreated animals — specifically keeping a family’s supposedly euthanized dog alive for six months as a source for blood transfusions — as “all a bunch of hooey.” The state…
For 41 years, no Dallas police officer faced charges for an on-duty shooting. With Tuesday’s indictment of former officer Carden Spencer, there have been two in the past week. Spencer, if you’ll recall, shot a mentally ill man in a Rylie cul-de-sac in October. He and his partner said the…
Sir Young may have hated to say that he was a rapist, but he couldn’t deny it, either. “That’s rape,” he said in a recorded interview with a Dallas police detective, describing his encounter with a 14-year-old girl. Young was 18 at the time. They were both students at Booker…
Forty-one years ago, Dallas police officer Darrell Cain was charged with murder for killing 12-year-old Santos Rodriquez as he sat in the back of a squad car. Though there have been scores of police shootings since, that was the last time a Dallas cop was indicted for shooting a suspect…
Texas has much to recommend it. Friendly people, a robust economy, no state income tax, etc. It’s easy to see why someone would want to settle down here. That goes for ordinary, law-abiding citizens, and it goes for cold-case murder suspects from Pennsylvania. Twice in the past six months (and…
This post has been updated with additional comments from Wylie PD spokeswoman Donna Valdapena. Wylie is, according to the city’s official website, an idyllic place to live. “Why Wylie?” it asks before answering its own question with a series of exclamations: “Historic Downtown!” “Woodbridge Golf Club!” “Community Events!” “Summer Fun!”…
