You’ll remember David Womble as the charming Dallas County maintenance supervisor who, according to several former jail employees, once donned a set of fake gold teeth during a meeting with subordinates, said something to the effect of “This is how we do it in the ‘hood,” and began to strut…
Sheila Stanmore buried her husband, Kevin, in May 2008 after he was killed in a standoff with Grand Prairie Police. At least, she thought she buried him. But what she and the couple’s three daughters laid to rest at Community Missionary Baptist Church in Desoto wasn’t quite what she thought…
Angel Dobbs and her niece, Ashley Dobbs, would rather forget what happened to them on July 13, 2012. That’s when a state trooper pulled them over as they traveled north down George Bush Turnpike in Irving, purportedly for throwing a cigarette butt out the window. What happened next was broadcast…
Around 4 p.m. yesterday, a Dallas County grand jury declined to indict 19-year-old Ryan Romo, who was accused of raping a younger fellow student in the back of his Chevy Tahoe following a concert in late October. At a sparsely attended press conference this afternoon, the Romo family’s civil attorney,…
T. Boone Pickens — billionaire oil man, erstwhile wind-energy apostle, multimillion-dollar donor to Karl Rove’s super PAC — wants his money back. According to a filing in Dallas County court, he claims he’s getting mostly stiffed on a $125,000 loan he made to political consultant John Weaver, who helmed the…
The saga of Ty, the Tyrannosaurus bataar fossil smuggled out of Mongolia and into a May 2012 sale by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, effectively came to a close last month when Eric Prokopi, the “commercial paleontologist” behind the sale, pleaded guilty to illegally smuggling the specimen into the U.S. But that,…
When Mary Kay Beckman was ambushed in the garage of her Las Vegas home in January 2011, it made national headlines. That was partly because of the brutality of the attack. The attacker “knocked her to the ground, and began stabbing her repeatedly until he recognized that the knife broke,”…
Today is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark court case that originated in Texas with Norma McCorvey and ultimately led to the Supreme Court sweeping away a number of state and federal abortion restrictions. Because of Roe, terminating a pregnancy in the first trimester is between a…
The Nacogdoches judge who granted a Douglass landowner’s request for a temporary restraining order against the Keystone pipeline back in November now is telling him to take his case to another court. County Court at Law Judge Jack Sinz ruled last week that he could not hear Mike Bishop’s fraud…
In 1969, Norma McCorvey was just 21 and living in Dallas with her father when she got pregnant for the third time. She was poor, working menial jobs and couldn’t afford another child. She wanted an abortion, but she also couldn’t afford the trip to one of the six states…
On a Sunday night in January 2010, Johnson County deputies responded to a domestic disturbance call on a rural road a couple of miles south of Mansfield. The husband, 33-year-old Joshua Adam Lewis, had gotten drunk and begun arguing with his wife and insulting her dead father. The argument escalated,…
On January 1, Texas took over the Women’s Health Program, booted Planned Parenthood out and dyed the website several shades of Pepto Bismol pink. Despite quite a bit of evidence to the contrary, Health and Human Services Commission officials continue to claim there’ll be more than enough doctors for every…
Let’s do this quickly, so you can incorporate it into all the sorrows you’re about drown after you leave work today. A state judge has denied Planned Parenthood’s request for a temporary injunction that would have allowed them to rejoin the Texas Women’s Health Program. According to Mary Tuma, a…
Three years ago, Jeremy and Kathryn Medlen’s dog, Avery, escaped from their Fort Worth home during a thunderstorm. They learned a few days later from Fort Worth Animal Control that Avery had been found safe and was in the custody of the city shelter. But by the time the family…
Last year, Jennifer Corea was convicted of burglary and criminal mischief after she attacked, then rammed the car of, a woman accused of having an affair with her husband, disgraced attorney Tom Corea. (We now know from a incident report later released by Waxahachie police that Jennifer Corea’s daughter was…
Irving Independent School District is playing games with 2010 census numbers that should handily introduce a Hispanic voice into the all-white school board, a failed Latino school-board candidate claims in federal court. Manuel Benavidez, a retired American Airlines employee, who made unsuccessful runs for the school board in 2000 and…
On New Year’s Eve, a state judge ruled that Texas can keep Planned Parenthood out of its new, state-run Women’s Health Program. On January 1, that program began; it’ll continue to be Planned Parenthood-less until at least January 11, when the next hearing in the case will be held, and…
On November 9 at a downtown Dallas law office, some 153,000 Internet domain names hit the auction block. The winning bidder was an entity known as Trans, Ltd., which put down $5.2 million and scooped up the names over the objections of their previous owner, Ondova, LLC. That auction never…
We return to the story of Danny Cantu, the middle-aged diesel mechanic who was preparing a sandwich in his South Dallas kitchen in 2010 when a flash-bang grenade punched through the backdoor. Dallas Police streamed into his home and, depending on whose account you buy, Cantu’s face somehow got pulverized…
For those of you who have been following the ongoing, never-ending, multi-court battle of Texas vs. Planned Parenthood, we’ll make this quick: Planned Parenthood is out of the Texas Women’s Health Program. Again. For now. Now, let’s all heave a huge collective sigh and revisit the longer version of the…
Back in May, Houston attorney Robert Painter got a panicked dispatch from the president of Mongolia: A 70 million-year-old Tyranosaurus bataar skeleton that had been illegally smuggled from the country was about to hit the auction block, and the sale must be stopped. Painter leaped into action. He rushed to…
In 2010, Gary Stouffer was on a resupply mission in Afghanistan when the vehicle he was riding in was hit by a blast from an improvised explosive device. The explosion left the 37-year-old Marine with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and anxiety disorders to go with the compression fractures in his…
