Ethan Couch is in the wind. Just don’t expect him to stay that way for long. A judge handed the “affluenza”-inflicted teen 10 years probation in 2013 for killing four people while driving drunk. The judge, Jean Boyd, apparently bought Couch’s defense team’s contention that he wasn’t responsible for his…
Crime and more cops in the Oak Lawn neighborhood weren’t the only things on the minds of demonstrators who rallied outside City Hall this weekend. Somewhere near the end of the gathering in front of Dallas police headquarters, the demonstrators, there to protest 12 violent attacks near the Cedar Springs…
Good news if you’re Rachel Dolezal or Navin Johnson. State troopers, at the direction of the Texas Department of Public Safety, are now going to classify you as being a part of whatever race you tell them you are. The change comes after an Austin TV (KXAN) station discovered that…
People who want to work for Dallas County and have a criminal record will now have a much easier time getting a foot in the door. The county will no longer ask questions about applicants’ criminal backgrounds on initial job applications. The move comes after a bill by Dallas state…
Not only has Dallas Cowboys defensive end Greg Hardy neglected to show any remorse for allegedly beating his ex-girlfriend Nicole Holder, he’s made it clear this week that he doesn’t even believe he did anything wrong. First, a brief recap. In May 2014, Holder told police that Hardy choked her,…
You and I saw the stories. Dallas defensive end Greg Hardy’s girlfriend had ditched out on prosecutors so that, even though he had already been convicted of beating her, the court tossed out the case against him on appeal, and he walked. We saw later that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones…
File under mysteries of the soul: that the suicide of the widow is somehow heavier to bear than the savage random murder of her husband. And then again, that’s nonsense. Who are we, strangers, to assign weight or relative value to the death of Patti Stevens, who committed carbon monoxide…
Just curious. In the wake of Monday’s random machete murder of a jogger on White Rock Trail, police have offered pieces of advice. Carry identification. I assume that would make it easier for them to identify my body. Don’t run alone. Sound advice. Even better, run only in the company…
Dallas County appears to be about to get itself into another mess centered on the county’s entering into contracts with some of the entities that underpin the nation’s prodigious prison-industrial complex. Last year, the county almost banned in-person visits as part of a plan to implement widespread video visitation at…
Princeton sits in an ocean of cookie-cutter suburbs about 40 miles northeast of Dallas, at the edge of a gold coast of development washing away horse country. To the west is McKinney; to the east, Farmersville. In between, there’s Princeton, where they love God, country and family and the divorce…
An Ellis County grand jury has indicted eight people, including seven volunteer firefighters, on charges arising from the sexual assault of a trainee firefighter, who in March reported that he’d been anally penetrated with a link of chorizo as part of an initiation ritual in January. Ellis County called in…
It’s been more than five months since Barking Dog Avi Adelman, formerly of Lower Greenville, currently of what we’ll refer to as Greater Junius Heights, raced to the Santa Fe Trail to take pictures of a cop who collapsed. The cop revived, spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, and…
John Cornyn really, really doesn’t want you to get that copy of Catcher in the Rye you’ve had your eye on, the one signed by John Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman. Texas’ senior U.S. senator graced Dallas police headquarters Wednesday to promote something that’s been a pet cause of his for…
Dallas Police Senior Corporal Marqueon Skinner has had better days than June 30. That evening, Skinner contacted Ashley Hughes through a Craigslist advertisement, according to a written statement he would later give police. Hughes, who admitted to Arlington police that she’s a prostitute, agreed to have oral sex with Skinner for…
In February, a missionary agency made a startling report about one of its members. “… Mr. [Jordan] Root admitted that he has been sexually attracted to prepubescent female children for many years and that during his service with SIM [Serving in Mission] he has been viewing nude photographs of children…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, indicted late last week for multiple felonies stemming from his alleged encouragement of investors to put more than $600,000 into a McKinney technology company, was booked into Collin County Jail Monday morning. In a civil proceeding, he has already admitted to one of the acts…
In 2001, under pressure from police and politicians, then-Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill launched a highly publicized crackdown on illegal eight-liner parlors that had sprung up like ragweed in dingy storefronts in Dallas and suburbs. Toby Shook, a defense attorney and former prosecutor, remembers Hill assembling reporters at a…
Mouthy women populate my lineage. My mother’s mother, college-educated before many women were in Kansas, widowed with two young daughters, so a single parent when few middle class mothers were, was what I believed would have been called at the time “outspoken.” She was a woman who had made her…
Let’s give credit where credit is due. The Dallas Morning News has done a perfectly OK job of covering Sandra Bland’s questionable arrest and alleged suicide in a jail cell outside Houston. Even chronically wrong opinionaters (i.e. Tod Robberson) have managed to swallow their worst hot-take reflexes and compose thoughtful…
Maypearl Chief of Police Kevin Coffey was arrested and charged with four felonies, including sexual assault of a child, after turning himself in Wednesday afternoon. Coffey, 49, contacted a then 14-year-old girl on Facebook two years ago, according to an arrest warrant affidavit. He sent her messages almost every day,…
Dallas is currently in the midst of an ATM theft epidemic. Twenty-four cash machines have been stolen since January 1. Thirty-one more unsuccessful attempts at stealing ATMs have been made in the same period. Dallas police are pretty upset about the whole thing, and generally push out surveillance videos in…
When a crime is seen from a distance, everybody’s macho about it and wants to lock up the bad guys for life. Sometimes things look different to the people who are in the moment. My wife and I were shocked to see video on Facebook of Alice Zaccarello getting mugged…
