On Tuesday, Eric told you about a DISD sixth-grader who was arrested at his school, DISD’s Learning Alternative Center for Empowering Youth, after attempting to steal $4 from a classmate. After his target felt the sixth-grader’s hand in his pocket and pulled away, the frustrated would-be thief knocked him to…
RT @psychscriv: Make sure none of these people have seats in 2014. twitter.com/PsychScriv/sta…We are in trouble when these Rs side w/ Sen Reid— Barry Smitherman (@SmithermanTX) April 11, 2013 The U.S. Senate voted only to consider gun safety legislation Thursday, which includes expanded background checks and increased penalties for illegal…
Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the advocacy group funded and founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is struggling to stoke the kind of grass-roots passion for gun regulation that has made its arch-nemesis, the NRA, such a political force. Organizing For America, the post-electoral version of Obama’s campaign machine,…
When a pantsless young man runs into his backyard in the wee hours of the morning and shines a laser pointer at a police helicopter overhead, criminal charges are sure to follow. But what if you’re in a Walmart checkout line fully clothed and decide to test that new light-emitting…
The woman on the line was frantic. She had been kidnapped the day before and didn’t know where she was, she told the 911 operator. She just knew she was in a house with one of her captors and could see a parked Dodge pickup from the tiny bathroom window…
There’s a robust debate, and a small handful of legislative proposals, aimed at reforming a school disciplinary system that charges hundreds of thousands of students each year with misdemeanors for things like chewing gum or wearing too much perfume. What happened today at DISD’s alternative school, formally known by the…
Around 5:30 this morning, 29-year-old Tomas Cavazos developed a serious beef with a pile of trash. A neighbor called police to report that the man appeared to be shooting the hell out of some debris in his front yard. Police arrived at a house in West Dallas to find the…
There are some large and generally predictable drawbacks to living a stone’s throw from Vickery Meadows’ Five Points intersection, which is a notorious hotbed of crime. Steve Parker learned as much soon after moving into his Hemlock Avenue condo in 2008. Things started innocuously enough when someone kicked a hole…
A couple weeks back, we gave you an update on the unlucky Liberty County couple still trying to sue the self-proclaimed psychic who wrongly told police they had a huge mass grave filled with tiny dead children on their property. Presley “Rhonda” Gridley, who the couple alleges is the psychic…
It was Independence Day 2011 when the boy and his father went to the abandoned shell of a house in rural Ellis County. They hoped they might find the treasure that was rumored to be buried there, but came up empty handed. What they found instead was a refrigerator, which…
U.S. Representative Steve Stockman is not a subtle man. We could go so far as to say he has a flair for the dramatic. He is, after all, the man who brought Ted Nugent as his plus-one to the State of the Union address, and compared the Earth to a…
A week ago Sunday, Justin Mark Stanert made a cameo on TheDirty.com, Nik Richie’s rather lurid crowd-sourced gossip site. By the standards of the site, the allegations against Stanert were tame. No nude photos, no rumors of liaisons with underage transexual prostitutes, just a report that he and his girlfriend…
Last year, nine years after the Prison Rape Elimination Act was passed, the federal government laid out final rules aimed at stamping out sexual abuse in America’s criminal justice system, with specific provisions for juvenile lockups. Dallas County’s Juvenile Department applied for and was recently awarded a federal grant of…
Inside First Baptist of Sunnyvale, Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland lay in a flag-draped coffin alongside the ashes of his wife, Cynthia. That was fitting in a sad way, their friends said, because they knew one wouldn’t want to go on without the other. Hundreds of friends, colleagues and…
This week, we’ve given you a little background on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and some reasons why two experts familiar with the gang are skeptical that they could be behind the murders of Kaufman County DA Mark McLelland, his wife Cynthia, and ADA Mark Hasse. In short: because while…
Every day, Dallas police respond to a disheartening number of domestic violence calls, too many to note. In 2011, there were 13,000 instances of family violence, most of them assaults. Last year, 26 women were murdered by their partners. Yesterday’s alleged thuggery took police to Great Trinity Forest Boulevard, where…
Nick Morale, a 56-year-old man from Terrell, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of making “terroristic threats” against the life of an unnamed county official. Lieutenant Justin Lewis of the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office told reporters Wednesday that the threat was left on a Crime Stoppers tip line Monday afternoon, warning…
When I spoke to Terry Pelz late yesterday afternoon, he sounded hoarse and exhausted. “I’m just about talked out,” he said. Pelz is a former prison warden at the Darrington Unit who now runs a criminal justice consulting firm in Missouri City, about 20 miles southwest of Houston. He’s been…
Kyle Coplen can pinpoint the exact moment the idea came to him. He was visiting a 93-year-old World War II veteran on January 23 whose home had just been vandalized. Mementos were broken. The walls had been covered with spray paint. The man was distraught, and so was Coplen, who…
It was less than two weeks ago that Dallas Police Chief David Brown appeared at a press conference to say that, despite the department’s initial hopes, they had no idea who raped three women in Lake Highlands over the course of a month. Now, they do. Officers arrested 30-year-old Cesar…
Every law enforcement agency in North Texas has descended on Kaufman County in the past several days following the murder of District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, at their home. The couple was found by a concerned friend around 6:45 p.m. on Saturday night, according to a search…
It’s been two-and-a-half months since Collin County Sheriff Terry Box made headlines (and, some might say, a bit of an ass of himself) by proclaiming that he and his deputies would have no part in enforcing federal gun laws that might “violate our precious constitutional rights.” It’s not a terribly…
