Claudia Yamell Castillo may not come out atop North Texas’ (unofficial) Most Hated Person list for September. With a week to go, that Balch Springs teen who beat a puppy’s eye out with a tree branch has to be the current favorite. But Castillo is a strong contender for runner…
Mulligan Mint is sort of like the companies that hawk gold coins through Sunday newspaper supplements and daytime cable TV, in that the money it produces isn’t legal tender, but the similarities end there. While the other companies play on the misty-eyed patriotism of octogenarians who still scour the ads…
Every man has his limit, and Leonard Small reached his late Sunday night, somewhere between the apartment parking lot where he was picked up for public intoxication and the Dallas city jail. When officers ushered the 25-year-old out from the back of the paddy wagon, they noticed that his pants…
Evidence has been mounting for years that Tasers are more dangerous than their manufacturer and law enforcement officials, who tout the weapon as a nonlethal alternative to firearms, have claimed.Over the past dozen years, 540 people, most of them unarmed, have died after being tased by police, according to a…
In 1993, on the 20th anniversary of 12-year-old Santos Rodriguez’s murder at the hands of a white Dallas police officer, the City Council pledged to “never allow such a travesty to reoccur.” It wasn’t a particularly bold statement. Promising to stop police officers from playing Russian roulette with unarmed children…
When the city broke ground on the $50 million Buckeye Trail Commons housing development, everyone grabbed a shovel. Never mind that they were all wearing business suits; this was supposed to be the beginning of a renaissance in the Bonton neighborhood that had until recently been burdened with the notorious…
For the most part, Americans have come to accept restaurant- and workplace-smoking bans. Even in freedom-loving Texas, most residents view them less as an encroachment on individual liberty than a reasonable measure to protect the health of nonsmokers, even if their politicians don’t. The alarmed cries of nanny-statism are now…
Anyone who frequents the escort section of backpage.com probably already knows this. Ditto for anyone who has given much thought to how police vice units are adapting to an era in which much of the sex trade is orchestrated online. It bears mentioning nonetheless: The Dallas Police Department is posting…
If the Texas Department of Transportation were a private company, it would have long ago plastered “Don’t Mess With Texas” all over T-shirts, belt buckles, chastity belts, firearms, and any other consumer good its marketing department could call to mind. As it is, the state agency has mostly limited the…
Dallas police Sergeant Carlton Barnes knew the man the bulletin described. They had gone to school together years before. Now, in September 2011, his friend was a capital murder suspect. According to an internal affairs investigation, Barnes ran the memo by a fellow officer, another former classmate, who confirmed that…
We can’t make you unsee our post about Ricky Davis, the Fort Worth man who raped a 12-year-old family friend. What we can do instead is offer the heartwarming story of Dallas animal control officer Lee Pogue in hopes of balancing out some of the soul-killing negativity we just put…
Bobby Gazdzicki’s plan worked brilliantly for three months. According to federal court documents, he discovered in April 2011 that as long as he could get hold of a legit tracking number, he could call FedEx, pose as a Dell employee and have the shipping company reroute brand-new computers to whatever…
Ricky Davis had known the girl since she was a baby. He wasn’t quite her uncle, but he might as well have been. His brother fathered four of her siblings, and Davis was close with the family. On August 19, 2012, Davis and the girl’s family went to church together…
Each year, Allstate comes out with a list of America’s worst drivers, and each year, Dallas is puzzled to discover it doesn’t come out on top, an honor typically reserved for Washington, D.C. That’s not to say that drivers here aren’t terrible. In this year’s report, Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Irving,…
Consider this a public service announcement for smokers of K-2 and similar products. There’s a widely available, all-natural product — a miracle, really — that delivers that synthetic marijuana-like high you crave without any unfortunate face-eating side effects. It’s called weed, and it’s about as easy to find as a…
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport’s “new, high-tech parking control plazas,” which cost $56 million and offer automated entry and exits for all visitors, were supposed to go live in late August, but the rollout was briefly pushed back because of minor technical hiccups. “The Parking Control System is a complex installation…
As anyone who’s ever forgotten to pay a toll bill or is capable of doing arithmetic knows, the eye-popping amounts owed by the North Texas Tollway Authority’s top toll violators is mostly fees. As an example, take reigning scofflaw champion Melissa Martinez. To rack up the $153,046.47 she owed the…
Dr. Alireza Atef-Zafarmand played a memorable role in The Dallas Morning News’ series on sexual abuse allegations at Parkland Hospital. He’s the kidney specialist who allegedly told a bedridden patient that she looked like Julia Roberts, then grabbed her breast and wrapped his fingers around her neck, asking if she…
In an interview with Unfair Park yesterday, and in a slew of postings on social media, recently ousted Dallas Voice Editor John Wright said he was fired for “doing journalism” by reporting on a nudity ban at this year’s Dallas Pride parade. His bosses disagree. “He’s been saying a lot…
The bloodletting that marked Sarah Colmark’s first year as general manager of WRR 101.1, the city-run classical music station, has eased in recent months. The resulting decline in revenue, on the other hand, has not. According to a memo sent to City Council members on August 30, WRR is expected…
A Dallas teenager is locked up this morning, accused of killing two people over drugs and money — and investigators have his mom to thank. Nineteen-year-old Jasper Okeith Adams Jr. was arrested by Dallas police on Tuesday for an outstanding warrant and quickly tied to a pair of murders. The…
Don McLeroy, a Bryan dentist and former Texas State Board of Education Chairman who made a star turn as the anti-science Sunday school teacher in last year’s “The Revisionaries”, was unseated from the board in the 2010 Republican primary. Yet his crusade, to use science textbooks to explain the full…
