Welcome to Congregation Toras Chaim. Sure, it may look like your typical Far North Dallas house — 3,500 square feet, $330,000 on the tax rolls, a swimming pool in the back — but it doubles as one of the area’s newer and smaller synagogues. This isn’t exactly a secret. The…
Dallas has never been able to clear the homeless from downtown streets, though not for lack of trying. Bans on panhandling, feeding homeless people, library benches and sleeping in public have provided city officials with helpful tools, but they have proved inadequate. Or perhaps it’s just that because they weren’t…
Jordan Ross Hatcher made a number of undeniably stupid decisions on the afternoon of January 24, 2013. He stole a Wii controller from a Grand Prairie Target, then knocked down the cop who tried to stop him. The 22-year-old, a recently discharged Marine, according to his obituary, then ran across…
In June 2012, attorney William Trantham was riding high. He’d just scored a half-million-dollar jury award on behalf of his client, a black Denton County prosecutor named Nadiya Williams-Boldware who was outraged by racist remarks from colleagues and superiors. Two days after the verdict, District Attorney Paul Johnson fired four…
J. Erik Jonsson took over as Dallas’ mayor at a turbulent time for the city. John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated on Elm Street, and residents and leaders were struggling to come to terms with the event and its aftermath. Jonsson responded by preaching a forward-thinking optimism, urging constituents…
At first blush, the death last week of Frisco 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan seemed like another one of those too-gruesome-to-contemplate, too-compelling-to-turn-away stories of child abuse that flash across the local headlines with disturbing regularity. According to police, the boy’s mother, 38-year-old Pallavi Dhawan, confessed to murdering her son while her husband…
Any creature can predict the winner of the Super Bowl. Those who have correctly done so include: an ape, a porcupine, a horde of puppies, a manatee, a seal, a panda, an octopus and a bunny. Add to that list the elusive “teen mystifier,” a 17-year-old Dallas magician named John…
In news that should surprise no one, the Texas Department of Transportation will not tear down Interstate 345, the 1.7-mile stretch of highway separating Deep Ellum from downtown. The Dallas Morning News reported over the weekend that the agency will instead repair the aging span, citing the same concern voiced…
The Wright Amendment, the baldly anti-competitive 1979 law designed to protect DFW International Airport, dies for good on October 13, when the ban expires on direct flights from Love Field to anywhere that isn’t in Texas or the four states that border it. And what exciting new destinations might be…
The United States has never quite figured out what to do with its spent nuclear fuel, some 68,000-plus highly radioactive tons of which is sitting in temporary storage at the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants. The plan has been to bury the stuff in a secure geological formation deep underground,…
It was the shot heard by a couple of neighbors in Rylie but, thanks to a neighbor’s conveniently placed surveillance camera, seen by thousands more: On October 14, 2013, Dallas police officer Cardan Spender shot Bobby Gerald Bennett in the stomach. Bennett was confronted by police after his mother called…
The folly of Texas Governor Rick Perry’s decision to opt out of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion has been well-documented. Billions in federal funds are off the table. More than a million poor adults won’t have access to health coverage. Texas businesses will wind up paying an estimated $400 million in tax…
A year ago, CBS 11 brought the world the tragic but ultimately hopeful story of Whitney Mitchell. The Dallas woman, 21 at the time, had been an aspiring dancer until sepsis took all four limbs when she was 18. She was learning to walk again with prosthetics and dreamed of…
Sooner or later, it’s going to happen. A driver for Uber or Lyft is going to crash. People will be injured, property damaged. And then, some poor Dallasite with a neck brace and a stack of medical bills Dallas will discover just how lousy these ride-sharing apps do insurance. That’s…
There are some obvious parallels between Ethan Couch and Josh Brent. Both got drunk and caused fatal car wrecks. Both had the means to hire talented private attorneys. Both were given offensively light sentences that sparked outrage. To most observers, that’s where the similarities end. Couch is white, Brent black…
Sohail Raza Khan would rather die than go back to Pakistan. He’s made this abundantly clear to U.S. immigration officials, begging them to send him to federal prison, or just let him rot in the ICE detention facility where he’s spent the past several years. Anything but deportation. According to…
After spending two years on the brink of shutting down, Parkland Hospital has turned a corner. Things are far from perfect, but the federal government is reasonably confidant that Parkland won’t kill you. That’s the medical side of things. According to a trio of nearly identical wrongful termination lawsuits filed…
Because you can never have too many reasons to feel inadequate about your teenage years, we’d like to introduce you to 16-year-old Graham Smith. By day, he’s your typical Episcopal School of Dallas sophomore. By night, he’s a white-hat hacker who’s recently gained notoriety by exposing security flaws in Snapchat…
For a full and detailed account of what Christina and Trevor Tutt have experienced over the past four months — a run-in with CPS, the removal of their children by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an ongoing legal fight to get them back — read this. It’s…
There’s no doubt that rookie Fort Worth cop Alex Hoeppner screwed up spectacularly on the morning of May 28. He and his partner, also a rookie, responded to the wrong house for a burglary call. When he encountered a man with a gun near the garage he opened fire, discovering…
At first, Mineral Wells police were stumped by Shannon Herrin Huddleston’s death. How could a grown woman, her home and person bearing no sign that she’d been attack, wind up locked in her own freezer? Things became clearer when the autopsy report came back in October and speculated that Huddleston…
Some might argue that Gary Lee Young was performing a public service as he hung around the parking lot of the Dallas International Street Church on South 2nd Avenue earlier this month. The Lord’s work, if you will. Not long after midnight on January 9, Young watched a would-be john…
