The so-far bloodless battle between open carry advocates and the city of Arlington continued Tuesday evening with a debate over whether guns should be banned at City Council meetings. Open Carry Tarrant County members, who showed up at Arlington City Hall by the dozens, said no. The Arlington City Council…
Jerry Temple is not the guy you want living in the apartment above you. Especially if you rely on a wheelchair, own a flat-screen TV and value your life. In Temple’s case, the unlucky neighbor was Kenneth Alberts, a 59-year-old disabled man who lived alone in a Grapevine apartment complex…
Dallas PD’s remarkable seven-month streak of not fatally shooting a suspect ended on Monday afternoon, when multiple officers gunned down a man outside Southwest Center Mall. Police say that Michael Mayo, 30, led them on a chase through the Red Bird area that ended in the mall parking lot. There,…
Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston is not happy with the Observer right now. “My issue is you reported one side and you didn’t get the other side,” he told us this morning. One side, the side we did get, was staked out by Dallas Police Chief David Brown when…
Police say that Benjamin Kevin Newman was drunk when he left The Hangout Patio Bar in Plano on Thursday night. The 22-year-old Dallas resident also must have been angry, since he allegedly steered his car into four people standing in the parking lot. “We believe, based on the evidence and…
U.S. Marshals on Friday arrested two suspects in the M Streets hit-and-run that killed 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez and critically injured his mother last week. Dagoberto Castanon, 25, and Rogelio Avila, 24 were discovered hiding in a Fort Myers, Florida, trailer park three days after they allegedly ran a stop sign…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown is once again denying accusations that DPD has watered down recruit training standards. The allegations were leveled recently by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston, who said a recruit was allowed to retake and ultimately pass the police academy driving test despite multiple failures. A…
Dallas police think they have a lead in the death of 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez. At a press conference this morning, Deputy Chief Gil Garza Dagoberto identified 24-year-old Dagoberto Castanon, a convicted car thief, as a “person of interest” in the Tuesday morning M Streets car crash that killed Vasquez. Vasquez…
When the Frisco Police Department discovered the body of 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan in his Frisco home, they said, he was lying in a dry bathtub with a cloth wrapped around him, surrounded by plastic bags. His mother, Pallavi Dhawan, had arranged him that way, and police claimed in a press…
Sandy Vasquez and her 13-year old son, Ethan, were driving west through the M Streets Tuesday morning, apparently en route to school at William B. Travis Academy, when a stolen minivan ran a stop sign and broadsided their Nissan Versa. The car, as the photos show was demolished. Vasquez was…
With sex crimes, particularly those relating to children, the fair administration of justice sometimes takes a backseat to the urge to punish. Just glancing at the headline of the Tarrant County district attorney’s announcement of a 70-year prison sentence for failing to register as a sex offender might suggest 69-year-old…
Rodrick Tippett got off relatively easy for the pair of burglaries he committed in 2009. After six months behind bars, the judge changed what had been a six-year penitentiary sentence to six years of probation. The fact that one of his victims had been his sister does not appear to…
On March 20, 2012, a year before her filibuster against abortion restrictions catapulted her to national stardom and a gubernatorial bid, state Senator Wendy Davis had the singular distinction of having her Fort Worth office firebombed. Davis wasn’t in her office, and no one was injured, but the bag that…
The accusations leveled last week by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston were serious: Dallas PD was relaxing standards for its driving- and firearms-training courses to allow unqualified recruits to become cops. More serious, certainly, than his assertion that keeping cops from shooting people, or allowing Avi Adelman to legally…
Yesterday afternoon, Dallas police were called to one of the dumber bank robbery attempts in recent memory. At 5:15 p.m. a man in his 40s pulled up to the drive-thru window (the sliding-drawer kind rather than suction tube) and placed what police described as a “suspicious device” inside along with…
Until now, there have been only vague hints of improprieties in Garland ISD’s H1-B visa program. There was an investigation serious enough to call in the feds, possibly involving foreign teachers paying fees they shouldn’t have had to pay, and a bunch of teachers’ visas were set to expire. Today,…
Pallavi Dhawan is still facing charges in the death of her 10-year-old son, Arnav, even though the final autopsy report ruled that “natural disease is most likely.” It’s for that and other reasons that the Frisco Police Department seems to have jumped the gun when it held a press conference…
Robbing someone is, without exception, a terrible idea. Robbing someone in broad daylight one block from police headquarters? About as dumb as ideas get. That seems what happened this morning in the 1200 block of South Lamar Street:…
The margins in the illicit cigarette trade are relatively low. Tobacco is legal, for one, eliminating the risk-based premium that comes with trading in illegal drugs, and there’s a lot of competition, which puts downward pressure on retail prices. But there is a margin, enough of one to attract entrepreneurial…
Update: Never mind. An appeals court overturned Gilmore’s decision. Original post: There have been two significant developments since the Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state doesn’t have to say where it got the pentobarbital it will use to kill death row inmates Tommy Lynn Sells and Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas…
Meet Kris Gentz, 59-year-old Princeton resident, 14-year veteran of Plano ISD, and, according to the feds, a compulsive gambler and prolific thief. Federal prosecutors, along with the FBI and Plano police, announced this morning that Gentz has pleaded guilty to embezzling some $2.5 million from the district, most of which…
Your average U.S. truck driver in the makes something like $.30 or $.40 cents per mile. It’s enough to make a living but not much else. Swap the 18-wheeler full of widgets for one full of Mexican marijuana, and the job becomes way, way more lucrative. Reliable data are tough…
