Readers, have you ever purchased coke or meth from a man named Yayo? If so, stop reading, get on a Greyhound and immediately get out of town. For the rest of you: “Yayo” was the subtle nickname of a convicted drug dealer named Sergio Moreno Vidales, a former Dallas resident…
Talk of closing the so-called “gun show loophole,” like talk of gun control in general, has died down in recent months. Partly, this is the inevitable ebb of the rage that followed Sandy Hook; partly, it’s because it seems futile to talk about something Congress has made clear it has…
Not too long ago, The Dallas Morning News promoted Avi Selk from the crime beat to the Irving beat, where he’s so far proved himself a more-than-capable chronicler of the bout of mild insanity currently gripping Irving’s City Council and school board. So, things are looking up for Selk professionally…
There were two main actors in the weekend stabbing of 26-year-old Good Samaritan Terrell Cowherd on Lower Greenville, police say: Jerry Brown, 23, who punched Cowherd, then held him from behind, and Julian Terence Martin Jr., also 23, who repeatedly plunged his knife blade in Cowherd’s torso. Both men were…
The collapse of the U.S. housing bubble wreaked tremendous amounts of misery on homeowners, who suddenly discovered that they owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth, or found themselves in overbuilt and mostly vacant subdivisions, or could no longer afford ballooning mortgage payments. But whereas they saw…
Even if what they put in the police report were true — and it’s now clear that it wasn’t — Dallas police officers Bryan Burgess and Michael Puckett had no business chasing Fred Bradford Jr. on the night of April 21. The two officers were on patrol in South Dallas…
Abel Garcia is several decades too old to be eligible for the services offered by Jonathan’s Place, a Garland-based nonprofit dedicated to helping abused and neglected children. But the 51-year-old isn’t one to let age stand in the way of his goals, which in this case was free clothing. Police…
When he was a kid, before his mom died during an already difficult upbringing and left him to spend his teenage years shuttling from one foster family to the next, Trrance King lived near a fire station. (That’s how he spells his name, according to court records.) The men there…
The party at 9807 Laneyvale Ave. in Pleasant Grove on Saturday evening started pleasantly enough. It was, after all, a celebration of the holy sacrament of baptism that had been performed earlier in the day. Then, Noel Lorenzo Hernandez crashed the party. Hernandez, a 21-year-old Irving resident, hadn’t technically been…
There’s something about the thought of air conditioning prisons that rankles Texas officials. Partly, it’s the cost: Cooling the 90 (out of 111) state-run prisons that lack any sort of climate control would run well into the millions. Partly, it’s a tough-on-crime thing: These are convicted criminals; nothing wrong with…
On Sunday afternoon, Terrell Cowherd’s father undertook the somber duty of going through his son’s things and offering an impromptu elegy to the reporters who showed up. “He always said Dad and Mom, thank you for everything,” he said. “Thank you for all you’ve given me, thank you for all…
Tom Corea, the disbarred Dallas attorney charged with stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients, is currently in the Lew Sterrett Justice Center, where he’s spent every day since a judge learned in November that he’d covered his former Design District office with penis graffiti. He’ll be there at…
It’s not hard to find pit bull puppies for sale on Craigslist. The tricky part is finding a seller, like 38-year-old Bryant Everett, willing to make the trip from his home in Fort Worth with three of the pups in a crate in the back in hopes of getting $150…
Azmi Elqutob never had a chance to hand over the money. The 66-year-old was behind the register at his Smokie’s Food Store, his family’s Fort Worth bodega, when Frederick Jones rushed in with a 9 mm pistol and a bandana over his face and fired twice. Jones grabbed a fistful…
Minnie Graham, a 98-year-old great-great-grandmother, kept telling her family that people were hitting her at Garland’s Winters Park Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. When her loved ones found her eyes blackened and her arms bruised, they demanded answers. Graham, they were told, had fallen out of her wheelchair. Her granddaughters didn’t…
In 2006, Plano police received a tip that a bookmaker there was illegally taking bets on pro and college sporting events. They began looking into the matter and had an undercover cop call the man up and put in one wager, then another. In relatively short order, Plano PD had…
You can almost pinpoint the exact moment Rudolph Casillas realized he wasn’t going to get the cash. The note (“Give me all the money I have a gun”) and firearm (actually a pellet gun purchased a few minutes before, but no one had to know that) seemed to work well…
It wasn’t quite daybreak on the Saturday before Labor Day 2010 when Latonya Lyons pulled her decade-old Ford Taurus to the side of the Central Expressway entrance ramp at Yale Boulevard. Something was wrong with the car. Lyons turned on her emergency flashers, checked her mirrors to make sure no…
The classic Nigerian phishing scam operates on the principal that if you email a far-fetched story about an West African prince in dire need of a place to stash millions of dollars to enough people, some poor schmuck will be gullible enough to wire some money. It’s not that the…
The police who patrol West Dallas know 21-year-old Juan Delarosa well. In his brief time as an adult, he’s already been convicted on three car theft-related felonies and awaits trial on a fourth. His preference is large pickups — Ford F250s, Dodge Ram 3500s and the like — though he’s…
It started out as an ordinary transaction: A man walks into the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway outpost of Sara’s Secret just before 9 p.m. Wednesday and asks to see their selection of fetish swings. The employee goes and retrieves an available model and shows it to the customer, who seems…
The prosecutor asked Alan VanHoozer how he knew Heather. “I’m Heather’s father,” Alan said, his voice struggling to finish the sentence. Not long after, he broke down and cried. Heather VanHoozer was 24 when she was killed by a drunk driver almost a year ago. She was supposed to start…
