Charles “Big Charlie” Flores and Richard Childs were searching for money when they slid under the garage door of a one-story brick home on Bergen Street. The Black family had built it in the early 1960s when the one-block neighborhood of Farmers Branch was nothing but pasture. They had raised…
Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz found himself, as he has so often, near the center of the political universe. Not for a good reason, either. In a series of reports released by The New York Times and The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company bankrolled by Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer,…
A Denton County sheriff’s patrol sergeant posted a Craigslist advertisement looking for a “needy twink” who wanted to have sex, according to investigators who arrested the officer on charges of solicitation of a minor. “I’m near UNT,” 46-year-old Weston Jordan wrote in an ad posted Tuesday. “I will host and…
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban denied doing anything wrong Tuesday, following the publication of sexual assault allegations made against Cuban in 2011 in Willamette Week, a Portland alt-weekly. According to Portland Police Department documents obtained by Willamette Week, a woman ran into Cuban while out on the town with her…
Fernando Cabrera needed someone with a car to take him to pick up some money that a friend known as “Pancho” in Mexico had asked the 21-year-old South Texan to collect. Cabrera, in turn, asked another friend, who asked a younger buddy whose mother wouldn’t let him use the car…
The gunshots erupted shortly after 2 a.m. Feb. 19. Dallas postal employee Tony Mosby, 58, had just left the Dallas Main Post Office in a United States Postal Service 11-ton box truck when a car loaded with four friends tried to pass him on the highway. The four had just…
There he is. Standing on a huge rock. Sitting on top of the world. “I just wanna say that yes, in fact, I do know how lucky I am,” says Wally Lynn, arms and heart wide open as he and his cup of Jack Daniel’s welcome a couple hundred guests…
Seizing on a teachable moment and the chance for a little publicity, Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree said Tuesday that his deputies are expected to take immediate action, rather than wait for backup, if they encounter an active shooter. Murphree’s directive comes 13 days after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly shot and…
It’s easy to forget, as much of a pro sports town as Dallas has become, that the city’s professional sports history is a comparatively short one. After a couple of false starts by both the NFL and AFL versions of the Dallas Texans, Dallas finally got its first permanent pro…
Two things — something that happened in my neighborhood last week and the school slaughter in Parkland, Florida — have conspired to reignite a line of thought plaguing me on and off over the last year or so. I’m thinking about the principle of community policing. I used to believe…
Dallas police Chief U. Renee Hall’s days as an out-of-uniform civilian administrator are over. The Dallas Police Department announced Thursday morning that Hall has passed her Texas Commission on Law Enforcement licensing exam, making her a real Texas police officer and allowing her to wear a DPD uniform. “TCOLE test done!…
I’ve got a serious case of what I believe the shrinks would call cognitive dissonance going on here, involving a conflict between local news and the news from the White House. First, the local: A suburban Dallas mother and father have been sentenced to federal prison — the mother for…
Former Texas Rangers starting pitcher Esteban Loaiza — best known for being the biggest piece in one of the best trades in franchise history — is in a San Diego County jail after being arrested on three drug felonies Friday. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s Border Crimes Suppression Team found…
For the second time in less than a month, a man hunted around a Walgreens parking lot on Ross Avenue, searching for an unlocked car. At about 2:30 p.m. Sunday, he found one and hopped in the back seat, just as a man had early in the morning of Jan…
A Dallas County grand jury declined Wednesday to indict any of the Dallas Police Department officers who helped kill the gunman who shot and killed six Dallas officers in a July 7, 2016, ambush, according to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. The decision closes the books on an investigation…
Starting next Monday in the Dallas Police Department’s South Central Patrol Division, a new kind of team will respond to mental health calls placed to 911. Instead of sending just police officers or paramedics, the city will dispatch a three-person team made up of a specially trained police officer, a…
Late Monday afternoon, the Observer received a statement from the Dallas Police Department about a “civil rights video” filmed over the weekend at the department’s southeast patrol division. It sounded very serious. “The Dallas Police Department is aware of the video filmed at the Southeast Division over the weekend and takes…
A Dallas County grand jury has indicted Wesley Mathews in the capital murder of his 3-year-old daughter. The grand jury also charged Mathews, 37, with tampering with physical evidence for allegedly dumping Sherin Mathews’ body in a culvert after killing her in the family’s garage. Mathews is now charged with…
After a day and a half of deliberations, a Dallas County jury sentenced former Farmers Branch police officer Ken Johnson to 10 years in prison Tuesday for the 2016 murder of Jose Cruz. Johnson, 37, shot two teenagers in March 2016 after he caught them breaking into his Chevy Tahoe at…
Following a 2017 filled with legal trouble, Joshua Baish, the owner of the now-defunct Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton, kicked off 2018 with an early morning arrest. Baish, according to a Denton County arrest warrant affidavit, punched one of his former employees outside Andy’s Bar before hopping in his…
A single porch light shined on a white mobile home one mid-July night in a rural neighborhood north of Dallas, illuminating drops of blood that trailed down the porch’s faded blue wooden steps. More blood pooled at the bottom of the steps and stained the porch’s handrail and floor. Along…
This case was different. The murder conviction this week of off-duty Farmers Branch police Officer Ken Johnson only happened because fellow police officers worked hard to make it happen. The lead community activist, seeing that a conviction would depend on good police work, worked equally hard to make sure his…
