Six people — including five volunteer firefighters — face criminal charges in Ellis County after a firefighter trainee reported last week that he’d been sexually penetrated with a sausage in January. Authorities arrested Keith Wisakowsky, 26; Casey Stafford, 30; Alec Miller, 28; Blake Tucker, 19; and Preston Peyrot on sexual…
A McKinney teenager who shot himself last week was given a stolen gun by a friend to use as protection against alleged bullying, McKinney police believe. Jordan Sharifi, 17, stole the handgun from a drawer in the home of the family he was staying with along with a box of…
Six people, including a Houston woman feds allege to be the gang’s ringleader, have been indicted in Michigan for allegedly being part of a conspiracy that led to a string of home invasion robberies in that state and North Texas. Chaka Castro, 40, used public data software to identify potential…
The case sounds like small potatoes, but the sentence lasted for decades. In the 1990s, federal prosecutors from the Northern District of Texas said they had evidence that Donel Marcus Clark was part of a group that cooked cocaine powder into crack and then weighed and packaged the drug. Clark…
The U.S. Justice Department will investigate whether Dallas County’s truancy and juvenile courts afford defendants due process. Only Texas and Wyoming allow truancy cases to be sent to adult criminal court, and Texas filed 115,000 truancy reports in 2013, according to a review released earlier this month by the Texas…
People who live downwind from cattle feedlots are familiar with the smell of crap in the air, and Texas Tech researchers took it upon themselves to study that crap. The researchers analyzed dust samples taken near 10 cattle feedlots in Texas and found something disturbing, according to a recent study…
The Dallas Police Association would like it known that you, the civilian outraged by recent police shootings and/or the proposal to legislate where someone can stand to film cops, are wrong. Policing, they want to make clear, is a tough job occupied by human beings who must make split-second, life-and-death…
The Dallas County Community College District has placed two El Centro College police officers on adminstrative leave after a video showing them making a controversial arrest — purportedly on March 25 — was posted to YouTube. The video shows four teenagers forced against a wall outside El Centro. During the…
A Dallas woman has been arrested and charged with child abandonment and endangering a child after helping her 7-year-old daughter into a dumpster near the King Spa and Sauna on Royal Lane and then leaving her there overnight Saturday, police say. Alicia Carroll called police at 9:40 Sunday morning and…
Richard Sheridan — perennial gadfly candidate, profane voicemail leaver and word-salad chef extraordinaire — has been arrested in connection with the June 2014 tagging of a number of Dallas buildings, including the Legacy of Love Monument in Oak Lawn, the Cathedral of Hope and the building where the Observer is…
Sometimes it’s hard for prosecutors to get a conviction. The case of Arlington’s “Black Hoodie Bandit,” judging from evidence the FBI says it found, will not be one of those times. Starting in November, the bureau says, Dana Campbell began robbing grocery-store bank branches — specifically First Convenience Banks. She…
People locked up in the Denton County Jail used to be allowed to see visitors two days per week. But when a company called Securus Technologies began offering a service for expensive virtual “visits” with jail inmates, things went down the way they usually do when Securus takes over. On…
The process, as described in a federal indictment unsealed Tuesday in Dallas, was simple. Recruiters would pay homeless people — including residents of The Bridge shelter in downtown Dallas — a fee, often $30, to visit a doctor’s office. The indigent recruits were given instructions on how to get a…
Robert Durst, the New York real estate heir charged with murder after famously spilling his guts into an open microphone in the HBO documentary series The Jinx, has some mildly weird Dallas connections, as revealed by NBC’s Today Show and Candy Evans’ local real estate blog, Candy’s Dirt. Linda Walker…
Texas is down to its last dose of lethal injection drugs. On April 9, pending court action, Kent William Sprouse — who killed a Ferris police officer and another man in 2002 — will be given that three-drug cocktail and Texas will become one of a number of states forced…
This story starts at a Plano IHOP. Early on the morning of March 25, 2014,, Cierra Allyn Rounds and Glen William Brunton met Kathryn Grace Dirks, Rian Lashley and a heroin dealer Rounds knew as Jaymo for breakfast. As they ate, Rounds and her friends became aware that Lashley had…
Nancy Duarte steps out for her interview at Dallas County Jail with a black eye and scratches on her elbows. She doesn’t mind being in jail, because it feels no different from what her life used to be like. Before her arrest, she says, she was living with her aunt,…
The news, at least as tweeted by the Dallas Police Department, is good. Of the more than 113,000 traffic stops performed by the department in 2014, only five resulted in racial profiling complaints being filed with DPD’s Internal Affairs Division. The raw data paints a murkier picture. Of those 113,000…
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them with firearms, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it. I have given you every ammo-bearing…
Warrants have been issued for two women running a Deep Ellum black-market butt-injection boutique. They are accused practicing medicine without a license. Denise Ross, known as “Wee Wee,” and Jimmy Joe Clarke, known as “Alicia,” agreed to give a woman her first session of butt-enhancing injections for $520, Dallas Police…
Five years ago, the trade group representing America’s prison chaplains conducted a survey to find out which state prisons allowed inmates to grow facial hair. The results of the American Correctional Chaplains Association survey were mostly positive for beard-lovers. The majority of prisons allowed facial hair, no religious reason necessary,…
The killer of two Henderson County law enforcement officers will not be executed by Texas as scheduled on Wednesday. Randall Wayne Mays, 55, was set to die by lethal injection before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals gave him a stay of execution, agreeing with Mays’ attorneys that more time…
