It was a lovely idea, trading in the lumbering yellow school buses for minivans, sedans and Suburbans on routes with just a handful of students, thereby reducing fuel consumption and saving money. The problem with Dallas ISD’s recent adoption of the plan is twofold: Parents, through some mix of aesthetics…
Larry Poulos wasn’t very close with his roommate. They had only been sharing their Arlington apartment for a few days, and they had never been formally introduced. The roommate knew him only as “Chino.” So, when Poulos announced on Saturday that he planned to rob a bank, the roommate took…
Alif Laam Meem — or, for those who prefer fraternities to go by a Greek acronym, Alpha Lambda Mu — first blipped across the national radar this past spring when they attended Mayor Mike Rawlings’ anti-domestic-violence rally outside City Hall. A photo the group posted to Facebook showing members holding…
Back in March, on the same day that a third Lake Highlands woman was raped in her home in as many weeks, Dallas Police Chief David Brown addressed the media and pledged a swift and comprehensive response. When a serial rapist began targeting South Dallas three months later, it took…
Stanford Hill’s glory days as a Dallas ISD basketball coach are now officially behind him. After winning a state title with Roosevelt in 2006, he moved to Skyline. During his tenure the team sunk from near dominance to mediocrity, posting a losing record in the 2012-13 season and barely sneaking…
Since the first Rick’s Cabaret opened three decades ago, the company has grown into a publicly traded strip club empire with more than two dozen locations nationwide. It prides itself on classiness, boasting on its corporate website that it was while dancing at Rick’s Cabaret that Anna Nicole Smith met…
It may have been that Johnny Charles Butler and James Robert Cleveland Butler hoped to etch their names in bank-robbing history by going out in a Bonnie and Clyde-style shower of bullets in August 2012. Perhaps the two brothers simply overestimated their chances against a professionally trained FBI SWAT team…
When federal agents raided local hacktivist Barrett Brown’s apartment last fall, throwing him in prison for what could wind up being the rest of his life, they succeeded in shutting him up for about a day. Soon, however, he was scribbling letters from prison claiming the FBI had broken his…
Updated at 4:56 p.m.: Dallas County Community College District sends word that, following a hearing in federal court this afternoon, they have agreed to allow Rodin to observer all the holidays. “Rodin has agreed to make up those clinical requirements on appropriate dates in January 2014,” DCCCD says in a…
Pastor Chuck Kitchens sees God’s hand at work in the creation of My Son, the first feature film produced by Burleson’s Retta Baptist Church. As he’s told the religious press, it was the Lord who placed its director, a 31-year-old film editor named Jarod O’Flaherty, in the pews every Sunday…
Here’s the bad news: If you are young, poor, black or Hispanic, disabled, or just graduated from college, you are significantly less happy than you were two years ago. Recent polling says so. Now, the same folks at Harris Polling who brought us that depressing tidbit now bring a spot…
It was 1:30 a.m. when Cornellias Simon, aka “Bean,” burst through the door of the apartment. The tenant watched as Simon staggered for a moment, then collapsed onto the kitchen floor, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. That was the first surprise. The second was the man who…
When Mike Miles announced a month ago that his wife and son were headed back to Colorado Springs, the question of whether Miles himself would soon join them was unavoidable. It would at least have been understandable given the shellacking he’s endured over the past year and a half. But…
Barry Smitherman recently leapt off the political springboard that is the Texas Railroad Commission and dove into the attorney general’s race. Heretofore, he has focused his campaign primarily on extolling the virtues of hydraulic fracturing, firearms and suing the Obama administration. Yet Smitherman isn’t just another Greg Abbott wannabe mindlessly…
Safe to say that most of us at Unfair Park celebrated Labor Day in the traditional way: by guzzling beer poolside while drunkenly scorching animal flesh. Many in Dallas chose to mark the occasion by more unconventional means, at least judging by the weekend’s police reports. Here is a sampling…
Ronald Thompson is not a particularly sympathetic defendant. Authorities say the 50-year-old visited Sea World in July 2011 to surreptitiously photograph young children. When police arrested him and seized his camera, they found 73 pictures of children in swimsuits, almost all of the images centered on the chest or buttocks…
Last we heard from Craig James, he was groveling for cash to pay off the debt racked up during his ill-conceived U.S. Senate campaign and denying that he killed five hookers. That was more than a year ago. Then, on Friday, Fox Sports Southwest reminded the world of James’ existence…
It’s been eight months since the Dallas City Council passed new rules forcing drivers to be nice to cyclists. It’s been six months since the short-lived, ill-conceived public education campaign. It’s been almost a year since some asshole shot up me and my bike with paintballs. So, what has become…
He’s held up five North Texas banks in six months. Each time, he wears a plain ball cap and glasses or sunglasses and calmly hands over a note and demands cash. His preference is for bank branches tucked inside grocery stores and Walmarts, always in the suburbs. He’s shown a…
Dallas County had long since forgotten what the metal plate above the water fountain in the Records Building was meant to conceal when, in 2003, it fell off. Even then, you had to be looking for it to notice the faded remnants of the “White Only” sign on the marble…
When the news came out that Avi Adelman, who stood sentinel over Lower Greenville for a quarter century, had sold his Belmont Avenue home, he was cagey when asked where he was heading. We now know the answer is Junius Heights, where he and his wife have purchased a modest,…
The Fort Worth Cats, Cowtown’s minor league baseball club, was supposed to make good on its debts on January 15, 2013. That’s at least what the team’s owner, former Congressman John Bryant, told us last December, explaining that the team was experiencing an acute but temporary cash shortage after the…
