On a late Monday night in 2013, police pulled over Brian Michael Hunter for making an unsafe lane change. He was arrested on old warrants and taken to the City Detention Center, which is run by the City Marshal’s Office, and placed in solitary confinement. The next morning, city jail…
Five years ago, Cynthia Wilson says, she was uninsured when she discovered lumps in her breast and abdomen. So she made an appointment at Planned Parenthood, where a doctor performed a biopsy and said she had ovarian cancer. From there, Wilson says, Planned Parenthood referred her to get chemotherapy and…
Texas’ rapidly expanding renewable energy industry owes much of its success to, of all people, a Republican state senator from Horseshoe Bay, one who is now trying to stop cities from banning fracking. Ten years ago Senator Troy Fraser authored legislation that required that Texas get 10,000 megawatts of its…
“I’m pregnant,” yells an unseen woman, surrounded by police officers, moments before one of the officers is seen throwing down his fist. The woman, Deanna Jo Robinson, says she was 38 weeks pregnant when she was arrested and punched by a Hunt County sheriff’s deputy on March 4. The event…
The case sounds like small potatoes, but the sentence lasted for decades. In the 1990s, federal prosecutors from the Northern District of Texas said they had evidence that Donel Marcus Clark was part of a group that cooked cocaine powder into crack and then weighed and packaged the drug. Clark…
People who live downwind from cattle feedlots are familiar with the smell of crap in the air, and Texas Tech researchers took it upon themselves to study that crap. The researchers analyzed dust samples taken near 10 cattle feedlots in Texas and found something disturbing, according to a recent study…
In 2007, former television journalist and journalism professor Eric Gormly made history at the University of North Texas for suing one of his own students. In the suit, he accused two professors and the student of conspiring to give him a bad performance review that got him fired. School officials…
People locked up in the Denton County Jail used to be allowed to see visitors two days per week. But when a company called Securus Technologies began offering a service for expensive virtual “visits” with jail inmates, things went down the way they usually do when Securus takes over. On…
Nancy Duarte steps out for her interview at Dallas County Jail with a black eye and scratches on her elbows. She doesn’t mind being in jail, because it feels no different from what her life used to be like. Before her arrest, she says, she was living with her aunt,…
A few weeks ago, the skin off the top of a well-trafficked portion of Haskell Avenue in East Dallas suddenly disappeared. It still hasn’t come back. Pictured above is the disfigured Haskell Avenue that has been left behind. When you are driving on thick, fully-paved streets this weekend, don’t forget…
Fort Worth oil heir Kenneth W. Davis Jr. is 89-years-old but continues to work every day as chairman of the Great Western Drilling Co. Impressive. Not too long ago, Davis decided to try something new: politics. The successful oilman cites unspecified “trouble” as his motivation to become political. “I never…
Five years ago, the trade group representing America’s prison chaplains conducted a survey to find out which state prisons allowed inmates to grow facial hair. The results of the American Correctional Chaplains Association survey were mostly positive for beard-lovers. The majority of prisons allowed facial hair, no religious reason necessary,…
Jason Harrison’s mother, Shirley, appears calm on the Dallas police officer’s body camera footage as she steps out of her home, followed by her son Jason. “He’s off the chain,” she says, shaking her head and looking annoyed. “Bipolar, schizo,” she says, explaining her son’s mental illness to the police…
Sunrise Asian Cuisine is a great restaurant to eat cheap sushi, but it’s even better as a restaurant to test your dining companion’s character. An uptight, square person will be alarmed by things they may have heard while dining at Sunrise Asian Cuisine, such as “We’ve lost our liquor license” or…
For two long weeks, workers at the Carmel Car Wash on Mockingbird Lane heard a constant “bang bang” sound. It wasn’t gunshots. It was cars going through a pot hole so bad that complaints of tire blow-outs were common. In the Lakewood Advocate, Rick Wamre wrote four days ago that…
One week ago, I went on something called a human-trafficking bus tour and have been struggling since to make sense of what happened. On a DART bus, accompanied by a police officer and about a dozen other human-trafficking tourists, we were taken past the Shops and Park Lane, where a…
The first rule about glitter bombs, if you work in the Texas Department of Public Safety, is you do not talk about glitter bombs. “DPS does not discuss security-related matters or investigations,” the agency vaguely told us in an email statement. (Subject line:”Inquiry about Glitter Bombs.”) But there appears to…
By 2013, the stories of child molestation in the Catholic church, along with the archdiocese’s attempts to sweep the allegations under the rug, were old news. In that year alone, sex abuse cases cost the Catholic church $108,954,109, according to a report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops…
There is nothing wrong with the way that Mansfield regulates fracking, according to the people who run Mansfield. “City leaders say the gas drilling ordinance in Mansfield is one of the most progressive and balanced ordinances in the Barnett Shale,” city leaders say in a not-so-modest news release. But some…
With the recent closing of Deion Sanders’ Prime Prep Academy over a $700,000 debt, it seems fitting, in retrospect, that the first Prime Prep employee to publicly accuse Sanders of assault was the finance guy. Kevin Jefferson was hired by Sanders’ co-founder/nemesis, D.L. Wallace, and worked as the chief financial…
According to Leviticus, if a woman has an issue, and that “issue in her flesh be blood,” then she is unclean. She must present a priest with two turtle doves or young pigeons in order to make things right. At the Eagle Mountain‐Saginaw Independent School District, if an employee is…
Lee Lemons still doesn’t know the name of the tow truck driver who killed his son, Lance. If he did, he’d want to ask the driver why he used deadly force over something that may have been a misunderstanding. “Why was your initial impression shoot first?” Lee Lemons said in…
