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…
Steven Kenneth Staley’s guilt was never much in doubt. The facts of the case, attested to by multiple witnesses, were clear. One evening in 1989, Staley and two female accomplices showed up at a Tarrant County Steak & Ale with guns. When police showed up, Staley took the restaurant manager…
Last month, Chelsea Davis filed a lawsuit, which in and of itself is pretty unremarkable given that she’s a lawyer.. Davis, though, is a patent attorney, and this particular suit has nothing to do with the nuances of intellectual property law, a fact she alluded to in a handful of…
Esparza’s family is seeking damages in excess of $1 million.
There’s something fundamentally troubling about seeing a judge on the campaign trail. Take Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, for no other reason than that he has waded into the debate. He knows the system and has successfully held onto his place on the state’s highest bench. Voters, assuming they…
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…
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…
David Hartman’s death at the hands of Highland Park police back in June was weird. For starters, there was the shooting itself. The 32-year-old had already been searched and was handcuffed in the back of the squad car when police say he managed to pull out a handgun and shoot…
District Attorney Craig Watkins has escaped from the contempt-of-court allegations that have dogged him for six months like Charlie Brown’s personal rain cloud. A specially appointed judge — a Republican from Wichita Falls who is far removed from Dallas County political intrigue — ruled that the hearing at which he…
The legal fight aimed at halting the advance of the Keystone pipeline through Texas was cut off at the knees on Tuesday. A state appeals court in Texarkana threw out Lamar County landowner Julia Trigg Crawford’s lawsuit against TransCanada, rejecting arguments that Keystone can’t condemn land because it’s an interstate…
Late one night in July 2009, Sachse police officer Kenneth Paul Smith happened upon a 13-year-old girl in a car with her boyfriend. When they tried to drive away, he turned on the lights and made them stop. It was around 3 a.m. when Smith arrived with the girl at…
Jeffrey and Henry Buck were married in Massachusetts on September 22, 2006, some two years after the state recognized same-sex unions. They moved to Texas in 2008 and quickly discovered what heterosexual couples have known for ages about the sanctity of matrimony: Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. The Bucks…
Carrollton police Officer Don Patin was pretty sure Jason Geils was drunk when he pulled him over on December 10, 2009, for speeding down Stemmons Freeway and driving in the HOV lane without a passenger. Patin said he could smell alcohol on Geils’ breath and, according to Dallas County court…
One of the undersung virtues of dating is the ability to end a relationship without lawyers and protracted litigation. It’s easier that way to make a clean break and move on with one’s life. Christopher Konvicka, a 24-year-old from McKinney, appreciates that fact less than most. He was dating a…
You may remember Cedric Moses as the entrepreneur who tried to convince the Dallas City Council to implement a mandatory dog-poop-DNA-testing regime citywide and then, when that didn’t work, trotted out actor David Keith of An Officer and a Gentleman semi-fame to do the same. Moses failed to convince the…
Since its anchor stores began moving out in the late 1990s, followed by all but a couple of other tenants, the empty storefronts and weed-sprouted parking lots of Six Flags Mall have become little more than a haunt for camera-wielding, dead-mall fetishists. It’s not completely dead — a Dillard’s outlet…
Property rights in Texas are supposed to be sacrosanct, practically God-given. So the ease with which pipeline companies seize private land through eminent domain is curious. The law here is anything but settled. That’s where landowners like Freddy Davenport come in. Increasingly, disputes between citizens like Davenport and huge pipeline…
A few years ago, in a case fracking opponents believed was the smoking gun they’d been waiting for, the Texas Railroad Commission sided with the industry. It said that Parker County homeowner Steve Lipsky’s gaseous and incredibly flammable water well was a product of naturally occurring, biogenic methane originating in…
Helen Pigg was still relatively spry back in 2011, at least for an 81-year-old. She was healthy and active, the historian for an association of retired Richardson school teachers and a supporter, online at least, of various progressive causes from the abolition of nuclear weapons to attacks on Chick-fil-A for…
The only crime Dallas police saw Fred Bradford Jr. commit when they came upon him on the night of April 21 was failure to wear a bike helmet. But, judging by the way he lurked next to the black sedan parked in the alley behind Kwick Stop Liquor in South…
All things considered, Mary Efurd is one of the lucky ones. She walked into Dr. Christopher Duntsch’s Texas Neurosurgery Institute in Plano on July 25, 2012 and emerged with her life. The same can’t be said at least two of his former patients, who died after Dunstch botched their surgeries,…
