On March 22, 2011, SMU officials issued a safety alert to students and staff advising them to be on the lookout for Daniel Hux, a recently expelled student who had been barred from campus. The fliers didn’t go into detail about why Hux wasn’t allowed at the university, and SMU…
On Tuesday, beer drinkers in three states filed federal lawsuits against Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s largest brewer and the purveyor of Budweiser, Bud Light Lime, Michelob Ultra and other innovative beer and beer-like products. A Dallas-area drinker has now joined their ranks. Michael Seidenstein, a 30-something man who owns property…
Last Tuesday, Dallas County District Judge Emily Tobolowsky temporary halted Heritage Auctions’ planned sale of the 1959 Masters green jacket. Augusta National, the famed Georgia golf club that hosts the tournament, had sued Heritage to have the auction stopped, claiming that the jacket had been stolen by former employees and…
The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments today challenging the constitutionality of and need for Section Five of the Voting Rights Act, which requires Texas and other southern states with a history of suppressing the minority vote to get pre-clearance from the Feds before implementing changes to voting laws. Naturally,…
In 1985, the Dallas Museum of Art accepted one of the largest gifts in the institution’s history: more than 1,400 pieces by Van Gogh, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, and others from the personal collection of Wendy Reves, collectively valued at more than $400 million. A quarter century later and four years…
If Andy Roddick didn’t walk away from tennis as the biggest asshole in the professional game, he was definitely in top two or three. His wasn’t the lovable brashness of, say, a John McEnroe either, but a whiny, self-indulgence reminiscent of a spoiled toddler. Justly or not, a lawsuit filed…
Joey Dauben’s reign as the muckraking king of Ellis County came to an ignominious end last month when he was sentenced to three 10-year sentences for raping a boy, then 14, on a church camping trip in 2007. It was an ironic end for the 32-year-old, who crusaded against child…
In the early morning hours of March 17, 2011, 23-year-old Kasey McKenzie was walking through the parking lot of Spearmint Rhino when she was struck and killed by a Ford F-250 with enormous wheels and a monster lift kit as it left a parking space. The driver, 27-year-old Eric Crutchfield,…
For 17 years, Tina Milton worked as a clerk at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Wynne Unit. Her job was to pore over inmate mail in search of coded gang messages, and she did it just fine until late 2006. That’s when she returned from a sinus surgery and…
Update at 4:02 p.m.:Heritage has issued a statement: “Yesterday the Augusta National Golf Club filed suit against Heritage Auctions over the Art Wall’s 1959 Green Master’s jacket being offered in an upcoming sale in New York City. Prior to their filling the lawsuit, Augusta National did not contact Heritage Auctions,…
George Martin and Marty Harrell used to be friends. They live 800 miles apart but swim in the same professional circles, the former heading Corsicana-based Navarro Pecan Company, one of the world’s largest pecan-processing companies, and the latter in charge of the Harrell Nut Company, which shells and sells pecans…
The way she tells it on her website, Delsa Thomas decided to launch her own investment firm after Citi Smith Barney, where she worked, merged with Morgan Stanley. She left in February 2011, taking a decade’s worth of experience as a stockbroker and financial advisor to her new outfit, The…
The folks at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science are excellent at putting together infotaining science exhibits. They are not so good at handling a minor PR challenge. That much became clear when, on December 30, a museum patron was injured. A week later, pressed by the Morning News,…
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…
