Late Saturday night, Dallas police descended on North Counts Boulevard in an isolated part of West Oak Cliff after neighbors called to complain of crowds, noise, and what turned out to be an enormous cockfighting operation. According to police, officers found some 200 live roosters, many equipped with razor blade…
August was a wild month for Randy Travis, what with the naked arrest in Greyson County followed two weeks later by a scuffle in the parking lot of a Plano church that resulted in a citation for misdemeanor assault. On that first point, the country singer says he’s now sober…
If you haven’t been keeping up with the sneaker industry recently, you probably didn’t know that today was one of the red-letter days on the calendar, when the new Air Jordan XI Retro “Breds” were set to be released. Several hundred were quite aware and showed up early this morning…
Just two weeks after former Dallas PD senior corporal Theadora Ross was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison for pocketing $250,000 from North Texas CrimeStoppers, which she was charged with overseeing, the Feds are again alleging fraud in the program. On Tuesday, the local U.S. Attorney’s office filed charges against…
This past October, the Women’s Southwest Federal Credit Union closed its doors. It was tiny, with just 743 members and $2 million in assets, but more important was its balance sheet. The National Credit Union Administration determined WSFCE was insolvent and had to liquidate. That’s when federal regulators began poking…
On May 22, Garland police raided the home of Willis Bassham, a 40-year-old social studies teacher at Garland High School, and seized his cell phone and several computers. Stored there were sexually explicit photos and videos of at least four female students. One, who was 17 at the time, was…
Hacktivist collective Anonymous has had a busy couple days, fighting their old foe the Westboro Baptist Church. Meanwhile, court records show that their former self-proclaimed spokesperson, Barrett Brown, has pleaded not guilty to twelve charges related to the hacking of the intelligence firm Stratfor. Brown was arrested and his Dallas…
Christmas is just eight days away, so people are rushing to get last-minute gifts. iPhones are always popular, and one can never go wrong with cash. Of course, everything’s so much cheaper when you just take it, as demonstrated by this weekend’s police calls. Even Santa got in on the…
More than three years ago, a woman Dallas police will not identify for her safety returned to her home on Frio Drive in South Dallas. A 36-year-old man named Hashim Anderson was there when she went to bed. At around 12:15 a.m., she jolted awake to “knocking noises and dogs…
Virgil Slay was at home in Oak Cliff on the afternoon of October 1 when his landlord arrived to kick him out of the room he’d been renting from her. His refusal sent the landlord, 42-year-old Toni Faye Taylor, into a rage. According to a DPD incident report, she first…
Dallas police were out in force near the Katy Trail earlier this morning, with four squad cars and at least as many officers gathered in the grassy area at Hall Street sandwiched between the trail and Turtle Creek. A few officers were by the brush along the trail, near where…
You can’t buy a gun in Venezuela. It’s illegal, and has been since the government of Hugo Chavez banned the private sale of firearms earlier this year as part of an effort to tackle the country’s sky-high murder rate: 19,336 last year, more than in Mexico, which is in the…
You probably noticed that today is December 12, 2012, or 12/12/12, which depending on who you ask is the Gregorian calendar’s last repeating date this century or the last date. Period. We’ll go ahead and assume Brent Troy Bartel falls into the latter camp. Police were dispatched to Bartel’s Richland…
The last time friends saw Damien Falgoust conscious was about 1:30 a.m. Friday, when he was sharing post-game drinks with his kickball teammates at the Knox Street Pub. He left the bar, got into a taxi and set off for his condo near the intersection of Matilda Street and La…
Late Friday night, Kevin Koudelka arrived home to discover that one of the windows of his Lake Highlands house had been shattered by a brick, and that whoever had thrown the brick had stepped through the broken window, and had done so numerous times en route from the car to…
You might have noticed that there was a marathon this weekend, and that two Cowboys were caught up in a deadly car accident before an emotional win on Sunday. You may also have heard that it snowed. There’s probably a reason you didn’t hear about the stuff below, culled from…
In May, the Texas Observer profiled Josh Gravens, a 25-year-old Plano man struggling to find a job and otherwise coping with life on the Texas Department of Public Safety’s sex offender registry. His crime? Molesting his 8-year-old sister — when he was 12. Gravens’s case illustrates a flaw in the…
Last we heard from Barrett Brown was the rambling, mournful letter he wrote from Mansfield Federal Detention Center, where he was taken after his dramatic arrest at his girlfriend’s apartment in Dallas. The feds are making doubly sure he stays there, having filed additional charges today against Brown, who might…
You can get a massage from SMU’s Dedman Center for Lifetime Sports, but it’s not free and it won’t be given by Edwin Kim. Kim, 24, was arrested by SMU police and charged with criminal trespass after he was found wandering the halls of the Morrison-McGinnis residence hall, posing as…
In 2008, Denton police began fielding reports from women who complained that their physician, Dr. Ramon Cruz, was overstepping professional boundaries. One claimed Cruz had put his hand down the front of her pajama pants. Another alleged he had grabbed her from behind and put his hand under her shirt…
The video above was taken at about 2:30 a.m. on Decenber 1 from inside the Texas Rangers store on McKinney Avenue. If you’ll watch carefully — or really if you just keep your eyes open — you’ll see the taillights of a white Ford pickup creep slowly backward, then smash…
Horse racing may be dying, but the horse track remains a uniquely fascinating place, with its mix of blue bloods and lowlifes united by a pursuit that cuts across all class lines: gambling. Even Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, a venue that from the outside seems relatively staid, is…
