On the evening of July 13, 2010, a 36-year-old woman checked into the emergency room of Lake Pointe Medical Center in Rowlett. She was suffering from a painful infection on her left leg, the result of untreated poison ivy, but that was relatively low on her list of concerns. As…
It’s impossible to overstate the heinousness of the crimes Eric Lyle Williams is accused of. Prosecutors say the 45-year-old carried out a cold-blooded hit on Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse as he walked through a courthouse parking lot one morning last January. Two months later, on the day…
There’s a reason it’s illegal to fire a gun in city limits (Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a year in jail and a $4,000 fine). There’s no telling whose head those celebratory New Year’s rounds might fall upon, or which kitchen window might be breached during backyard target practice. On…
At midday on Wednesday, Dallas police and firefighters broke down the front door of a small townhome in the 1800 block of Browder Street in the Cedars to perform a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Nick and Vanessa Pitofsky, both dead of gunshot wounds. Police are describing…
If The Dallas Morning News’ brief account of the Monday morning robbery of Hometown Day Spa left you a bit confused, you’re forgiven. Two armed men walk in and credibly pass themselves off as customers for several minutes as they plot their heist? The answer, as always, can be found…
It’s not easy to call the cops on your boyfriend when he’s a powerful judge, but in the beginning, it seemed that the law was on Maggie Strother’s side. Dallas Police Department officers visited the Uptown condo of state District Judge Carlos Cortez on December 28. There, Strother showed them…
Rewind for a moment to the morning of April 15, 2013. Tyrone Allen, 26, allegedly murders his pregnant girlfriend in Hamilton Park, then leads police on a wild 40-minute chase that ends about a block from where it began. He’s finally pulled from beneath a house and arrested after a…
William Ian Brown did not have a prescription for the single alprazolam (Xanax) pill he was allegedly carrying in his pocket when he was arrested on Sunday. A crime, to be sure, but a minor one. If prosecutors decided to pursue the case — given that it was a single…
It’s a curious phenomenon, the “death row groupies” who become enamored with men who committed some of the most vile crimes you can imagine. When Scott Peterson arrived at California’s San Quentin State Prison fresh off a conviction of murdering his wife and unborn child, he received a marriage proposal…
The days when you had to actually smoke marijuana to get dosed with THC ended long ago with the discovery that the chemical can be melted into butter and baked into brownies. Ganjapreneurs in Colorado are taking things to a completely different level. In Denver, you can get high via…
Longhorn Wrecker has a very long list of of enemies. That’s only natural in an industry predicated on holding people’s vehicles hostage for exorbitant fees, especially when you do business the way that Longhorn does business. Put another way, it will be no easy task to identify the man who…
There’s not a lot of what Michael Pollan would call “food” at South Dallas’ KSO Dollar Mart. Plenty of beer, wine and hair care products, according to the signs out front, but not much by way of whole grains or fresh produce. The store nevertheless did a thriving business in…
Robert Hamilton, 72, was walking down the 2900 block of Jeffries Street in South Dallas at 4 p.m. on Thursday when he was approached by a group of five boys. ‘Hey old man,” they called to him, according to a police report. “You got some money?” Hamilton did have money,…
When he gets out of federal lockup, Michael Allen Watson may want to consider finding a new line of work. His current vocation — counterfeiting money using computer printers — isn’t working out so well. Six years ago, the U.S. Secret Service raided Watson’s Dallas home after a pit bull…
Ronnie’s Catfish & More is delicious. How delicious? This delicious: According to Dallas police, a man walked into the Ronnie’s location on Red Bird Lane at 7:45 p.m. Tuesday. “What can I get for six bucks?” he asked. He ordered a two-piece catfish basket ($4.69 plus tax, includes fries, pickles,…
Generally speaking, the Dallas Police Department does Twitter pretty well. Helmed by a chief who uses it to live-tweet disciplinary hearings and set up lunch dates with reporters at Chili’s, and who isn’t afraid to drop a “cocksucker” every now and then, DPD’s output is timely and detailed enough to…
A week ago, the Frisco Police Department was convinced that it had a solid case against Pallavi Dhawan in the mysterious death of her 10-year-old son, Arnav, and was ready to tell everyone about it. “Officers asked if she had killed the child and Mrs. Dhawan nodded her head ‘yes,'”…
Frisco has some sort of ordinance that prosecutes humans who hold signs. The police know this, because they used that ordinance as an excuse to bust the man who waved a “Police Ahead” sign at passing motorists. As we told you last month, Ron Martin was arrested by the very…
Ethan Couch, the 16-year-old from Keller who drunkenly ran over four pedestrians, then got probation after pleading affluenza, was back in court yesterday to learn the conditions of his sentence. Reporters were barred from the courtroom by District Judge Jean Boyd, who, according to the Tarrant County DA’s office, ordered…
Michael McDowell could have quit while he was ahead. During more than a decade spent posing as a military officer, he’d won heartfelt acclaim from military brass like CIA director David Petraeus, gotten behind-the-scenes access to the Washington Navy Yard, convinced the state of Texas to give him special Purple…
Dallas has never been able to clear the homeless from downtown streets, though not for lack of trying. Bans on panhandling, feeding homeless people, library benches and sleeping in public have provided city officials with helpful tools, but they have proved inadequate. Or perhaps it’s just that because they weren’t…
At first blush, the death last week of Frisco 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan seemed like another one of those too-gruesome-to-contemplate, too-compelling-to-turn-away stories of child abuse that flash across the local headlines with disturbing regularity. According to police, the boy’s mother, 38-year-old Pallavi Dhawan, confessed to murdering her son while her husband…
