Dallas park “ambassador” Courtney Wright, patrolling the front lines of Lake Highlands Park, stood firmly next to the destroyed soccer goal post as angry parents confronted him. One of the parents, videotaping the encounter, asked him why he broke their soccer equipment. “You guys have been instructed to take it…
Now that Susan Hawk is back to work as Dallas County’s DA after seeking treatment for clinical depression, she should offer her prosecutors paid maternity leave. Because why not? It’s a decent thing to do, but even better for Hawk, it would be a badass political move. Hawk is the…
The Baptist pastor with bright blonde hair was popular among preteen boys in the small town of Commerce, a former resident remembers. Pastor Billy Bob Burge worked in Commerce around 12 years ago, says the man, who asked not to be named. His son’s friends who were involved in the…
At the contentious townhall meetings between city of Dallas staffers who insist Dallas Executive Airport is going to expand and neighboring Oak Cliff residents who would rather it didn’t, one airplane in particular has drawn flak. “At previous meetings, everyone has brought up the yellow airplane that was so loud,”…
In Dallas and other cities across the country, local transit agencies are proud to announce that their buses run on natural gas. Natural gas puts less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than diesel, so the switch to natural gas is supposed to be a positive step to slow global warming…
“Hi,” the woman says, in a voice that isn’t friendly. “What are you doing?” It’s a pitch black night in mid-August in Southeast Dallas. Marina Tarashevska wields a camera as she approaches the back of a black pickup. A man wearing a cowboy hat opens the driver’s door to get…
On August 10, a soccer mom and dad say, a Dallas parks employee destroyed their league’s goal posts and then threw them into a creek that feeds into White Rock Lake. Members of the Dallas Park Board, meanwhile, maintained last week that they don’t know whether that’s true. In the meantime,…
In one narrative, a Dallas developer hoping to capitalize on Bishop Arts has decided to listen to citizens and do what is right. Alamo Manhattan, the company that once promised to make Oak Cliff cool with giant apartment structures over existing homes and businesses, in a project that was to…
The only libraries at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center are law libraries. Inmates crowd in the rooms on a weekday, buried in legal books, as if they’re in law school. And in a sense they are. People use the law libraries here mainly to understand their criminal charges, looking for…
The local news satire site Dallas Brisket described the situation best: “City Decides Polluting River Preferable to Minorities Playing Soccer.” A Dallas employee who works for the Park Department was shown destroying a youth soccer league’s goal post at Lake Highlands Park, in a video that aired last week on CBS-11…
Last week, Texas authorities made the unprecedented decision to reject science. (Just kidding, they do that all the time.) The science dates back to April, when a peer-reviewed study by Southern Methodist University geologists seemed to finally confirm what many people living in Azle had long suspected: a recent, surprising…
Dallas Animal Services, the city’s animal control agency, is under-funded, its managers and supporters say, and has just over 100 full-time people on staff. Among people who follow such things, the general impression is that 101 people actually work full time for DAS, since the city gave the agency a budget…
The white pit bull with no collar charged toward Charlie Howell as his wife restrained their own dogs behind him. Howell felt he had no choice but to tackle the animal. “I made the split-second decision that I was not going to let it get past me,” Howell says. As…
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has a fantastic announcement about Texas’ air quality: It’s great! In an announcement his office posted last week about his staunch refusal to follow the Environmental Protection Agency’s new carbon regulations, he buries this inspiring news: …despite the past 15 years of rapid population and economic growth,…
What happens if you’re an apartment-dweller who catches a wrecker driver in the act of illegally towing your car? You get attacked, according to a personal injury lawsuit filed in Tarrant County on Wednesday. Damion Gilbert says in his suit that he had already once caught Excalibur towing about to…
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…
One great thing about America is that random companies can’t take your car away without any warning if you failed to register it with the state. Sure, it’s illegal to drive with an out-of-date registration sticker, but that’s no excuse for corporate-sponsored vehicle theft. At least in theory, it’s not…
The bucket of seven starving baby kittens fell onto the radar of local animal rescuers by chance. Carla Adkins, a teacher who began volunteering as a rescuer after she kept encountering stray dogs near her home in Oak Cliff, was at the Dallas Animal Services shelter on Tuesday, checking on…
Sure, the main anti-towing activist in Texas is facing child sexual assault charges, but that doesn’t mean towing companies in Dallas are angels. Of all of the towing companies covered here, the Observer’s personal favorite is Longhorn Wrecker, headed by a foul-mouthed man named Patrick. Several years ago, a resident…
Blogger Pat Johnson has been a consistent thorn in the side of the state’s towing companies and a champion on behalf of angry drivers whose cars have been hauled away. When a Texan believes her car was wrongfully towed — say, pulled out of her own apartment parking lot for…
Dallas oil heiress/philanthropist/bridge-to-somewhere’s namesake Margaret Hunt Hill died in 2007 at the age of 91. Shortly after, her grandson Al Hill III became sort-of famous for filing a lawsuit against his own father, his aunts and his siblings, as families tend to do when there is a multi-billion-dollar trust at stake. A…
Essure is a birth control device designed to stay inside a woman’s body forever. “There is no good way, from the company, from the manufacturer, to take it out,” an Austin-based doctor told us in last week’s cover story about the device. Thousands of women have come forward online and…
