David Womble, a Dallas County maintenance supervisor, leaves an impression on his employees. In June, three of them sued the county for discrimination after one, Dennis Jones, was fired for having previously disclosed felony convictions while his white colleagues were not. Womble, the suit claimed, created a hostile work environment,…
Strip clubs are the brave new frontier in employment lawsuits. Women who were for years treated as “independent contractors” are filing suit in droves against their current or former employers. All of them want basically the same thing: the minimum wage and overtime money they feel they should have gotten…
In June, as part of its ongoing effort to further endear itself to the driving public, the North Texas Tollway Authority announced it would post the names of its top toll violators for all to see. Done. The agency simultaneously announced it would be filing civil lawsuits against some of…
On June 29, if you’ll recall, a DART paratransit van inexplicably plowed into a line of stopped cars on the Tollway. The first question upon seeing the crash was, naturally, What the hell is that driver on? Drugs or a cell phone?. The inside-the-bus video, which showed the driver’s placid…
ATI Career Training Center is the type of school you see advertised on daytime TV. It prepares its graduates for “rewarding careers” in “fields such as health care, personal fitness and wellness, business technology, information technology, automotive repair, air conditioning and refrigeration repair, and welding,” per its website. Three years…
It was a question the legal system had never faced before: If the state pays a man millions of dollars for locking him up for a crime he didn’t commit, does the wife he left behind get a piece of that? There was no need for an answer before the…
In 2009, Rolanda Dickerson went to Forest Park Medical Center for a tummy tuck. Instead, according to a lawsuit first reported by Courthouse News, Dr. John Alexander gave her a gastric bypass. That was a problem both because the procedure wasn’t what she had agreed to and because Dickerson had…
For the second time in three days, a federal court has called a Texas voting measure as discriminatory. Earlier today, a three-judge panel in D.C. issued an opinion striking down the state’s voter ID law, passed by the legislature last year. The law would require voters to present a valid…
When the Texas legislature passed new redistricting maps in 2011, it sure seemed that the lines had been drawn to dilute the power of Democratic-leaning Hispanic voters in favor of Republicans. State leaders swore that wasn’t the case, but, rather than taking them to an unfriendly Justice Department for a…
On the evening of October 29, 2010, Matthew Tate and other Dallas police officers were conducting a sweep of the Cedar Garden apartment complex in east Oak Cliff when they came upon Tobias Mackey. According to officers’ accounts, Mackey began to reach into his waist band when ordered to show…
Dr. Meenakshi Prabhakar, an infectious disease specialist, probably wishes August would hurry up and end already. Earlier this month, we wrote about Prabhakar’s receptionist, who sued the doctor for allegedly forcing her to get an abortion. Why? Tough to say. But someone from Prabhakar’s office told us it was a…
John MuseJohn Muse is the ‘M’ of HM Capital Partners, the private equity firm he co-founded with former Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks in 1989. It was for a while one of the most recognized leveraged buyout firms in the country before it all but collapsed when the tech bubble…
A Parker County man who can ignite a 2-foot flame with gas siphoned from his well water won’t get relief in a state appeals court under a law intended to stifle abusive litigation. Steve Lipsky says natural-gas producer Range Resources contaminated his water well with its nearby fracking operations. Range…
A split three-judge panel of a federal appeals court rejected an EPA rule that would curb the drift of harmful power plant pollutants across state lines. The agency, the majority ruled, had overstepped its authority under the Clean Air Act. The legal challenge was mounted by a number of states…
Two months ago, a judge in New York granted a request by the U.S. government issued a warrant for the arrest of one Tyrannosaurus bataar. The dinosaur’s skeleton, which Dallas-based Heritage Auctions had attempted to sell the previous month, was suspected of being in the country illegally, having been illegally…
Outside Cowboys Stadium, near entrance E, is a black, marble bench. As things that are black and marble tend to do, the bench gets hot when exposed to the summer sun. Jennelle Carrillo says she discovered this the hard way when, on August 10, 2010, she sat down to wait…
Zahed Lateef was a born entrepreneur. His family emigrated to the United States from India as a kid, and he was soon hard at work. He established a lawn-mowing business when he was 11 then, after graduating from high school a year early, launched a company that bought and sold…
Charles Paternostro was 14 when, in the mid-’50s, his father purchased an acre of land on a five-story cliff overlooking Lake Texoma and built a modest, three-bedroom home. The family lived in Dallas full-time but spent their weekends at the reservoir, boating and swimming and fishing. After his parents died,…
Gino Romano, alias Jonathan Lee Riches, alias Johnny Suenami, sued the Kardashian sisters, Kris Jenner, Lamar Odom and Mark Cuban in federal court. Why? Because they’re trying to kill him. Because he has a sex tape involving the Kardashians and Cuban. Because he witnessed it all from an air duct…
In early June, Governor Rick Perry was quick to announce that no state of his would be taking any of that tyrannical federal money to expand Medicaid coverage. Yet court documents filed by outgoing Health and Human Services Commissioner Tom Suehs claim that the state’s new, Planned Parenthood-free Women’s Health…
For four days last October, the Magnablend chemical plant along Highway 237 in Waxahachie burned. A flammable gas cloud had formed during the blending process and had been ignited by a spark of unknown origin. As the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality determined, “It appears that the incident could have…
Update on Aug. 10: Got an email response from Nalini Samuel, who works in Prabhakar’s office. Haven’t been served yet. Would love to comment- completely untrue- shakedown to get money. Ask her about her criminal record- Dr. Prabhakar is pro life. Original post: Christina Garcia began working as an $11-per-hour…
