When Danny Secker died unexpectedly last January at the age of 41, he left behind a widow, three sons — one 3 years old, the others 5-month-old twins — along with a $1 million life insurance policy through Transamerica to help see his family through. The timing of the life…
Larry Poulos wasn’t very close with his roommate. They had only been sharing their Arlington apartment for a few days, and they had never been formally introduced. The roommate knew him only as “Chino.” So, when Poulos announced on Saturday that he planned to rob a bank, the roommate took…
Back in March, on the same day that a third Lake Highlands woman was raped in her home in as many weeks, Dallas Police Chief David Brown addressed the media and pledged a swift and comprehensive response. When a serial rapist began targeting South Dallas three months later, it took…
It may have been that Johnny Charles Butler and James Robert Cleveland Butler hoped to etch their names in bank-robbing history by going out in a Bonnie and Clyde-style shower of bullets in August 2012. Perhaps the two brothers simply overestimated their chances against a professionally trained FBI SWAT team…
It was 1:30 a.m. when Cornellias Simon, aka “Bean,” burst through the door of the apartment. The tenant watched as Simon staggered for a moment, then collapsed onto the kitchen floor, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. That was the first surprise. The second was the man who…
Safe to say that most of us at Unfair Park celebrated Labor Day in the traditional way: by guzzling beer poolside while drunkenly scorching animal flesh. Many in Dallas chose to mark the occasion by more unconventional means, at least judging by the weekend’s police reports. Here is a sampling…
He’s held up five North Texas banks in six months. Each time, he wears a plain ball cap and glasses or sunglasses and calmly hands over a note and demands cash. His preference is for bank branches tucked inside grocery stores and Walmarts, always in the suburbs. He’s shown a…
A couple of years ago, Dallas police officers parked one of their bait cars outside an apartment complex in West Oak Cliff, complete with a set of keys and unlocked doors. But the man who took the car, 31-year-old Louis Torres, didn’t bother with the keys; he used a tow…
Late Wednesday morning, would-be customers of Teskey’s Saddle Shop, both in Weatherford and Fort Worth, were surprised to find themselves turned away from a store that was under federal lockdown. Went to Teskey’s to buy hay and they were on lock down and cop said federal investigation. What’s up?— BrookeJeter…
It’s such a familiar scenario, you suspect there’s some sort of script. Some fresh-faced young man, or else an adult whose face is a bit too weathered for their years, knocks on the door. They’re a troubled youth in a crime-ridden urban area, a single parent trying to make ends…
Over the course of several months in 2008, undercover narcotics detectives with the Dallas Police Department visited El Palacio Bar at 4430 Maple Ave. on three occasions and asked for cocaine. Each time, their server dutifully retrieved a small plastic baggie of powdered nine-hour energy from a storage closet. It…
There was something about the man that seemed suspicious. Maybe it was that he was riding a bike through an otherwise slumbering West Dallas neighborhood at 2 a.m. on a Monday. Maybe it was the way he paused to glance into the cars parked along the street. Maybe a streetlight…
Maybe you’ve had a bad week. Maybe work sucked. Maybe your car broke down or you were dumped by your significant other or your cat died. Maybe you experienced all of that. Even if you did, you had a better week than Reginald Keith Zackery Jr. Zackery’s misery began last…
A 25-year-old woman was kidnapped while leaving a downtown party on Thursday night. According to police, the woman was getting into her 2004 Lexus, parked in a lot adjacent to Bryan Tower at about 11 p.m. when a man approached with a gun and knife. He forced her inside, hopped…
Readers, have you ever purchased coke or meth from a man named Yayo? If so, stop reading, get on a Greyhound and immediately get out of town. For the rest of you: “Yayo” was the subtle nickname of a convicted drug dealer named Sergio Moreno Vidales, a former Dallas resident…
Talk of closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” like talk of gun control in general, has died down in recent months. Partly, this is the inevitable ebb of the rage that followed Sandy Hook; partly, it’s because it seems futile to talk about something Congress has made clear it has…
Not too long ago, The Dallas Morning News promoted Avi Selk from the crime beat to the Irving beat, where he’s so far proved himself a more-than-capable chronicler of the bout of mild insanity currently gripping Irving’s City Council and school board. So, things are looking up for Selk professionally…
There were two main actors in the weekend stabbing of 26-year-old Good Samaritan Terrell Cowherd on Lower Greenville, police say: Jerry Brown, 23, who punched Cowherd, then held him from behind, and Julian Terence Martin Jr., also 23, who repeatedly plunged his knife blade in Cowherd’s torso. Both men were…
The collapse of the U.S. housing bubble wreaked tremendous amounts of misery on homeowners, who suddenly discovered that they owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, or found themselves in overbuilt and mostly vacant subdivisions, or could no longer afford ballooning mortgage payments. But whereas they saw…
Even if what they put in the police report were true — and it’s now clear that it wasn’t — Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett had no business chasing Fred Bradford Jr. on the night of April 21. The two officers were on patrol in South Dallas…
Abel Garcia is several decades too old to be eligible for the services offered by Jonathan’s Place, a Garland-based nonprofit dedicated to helping abused and neglected children. But the 51-year-old isn’t one to let age stand in the way of his goals, which in this case was free clothing. Police…
When he was a kid, before his mom died during an already difficult upbringing and left him to spend his teenage years shuttling from one foster family to the next, Trrance King lived near a fire station. (That’s how he spells his name, according to court records.) The men there…
