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…
A former dancer for the Dallas Mavericks’ male dance team went on a violent rampage in far southwest Dallas last night, using guns and a grenade, killing four people and wounding others, police say. It began at around 10:30 p.m., when 44-year-old Erbie Bowser walked into his ex-girlfriend’s home on…
Trendon Shavers, the McKinney man accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of running a pioneering Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, hasn’t denied that he was running a scam or that he was using investors’ cash to finance his day trading and trips to the casino. His main defense is that Bitcoin…
Tyler Holder, the Saginaw teen accused of brutally raping and murdering 6-year-old Alanna Gallagher, was moved from the hospital to the Tarrant County Jail on Wednesday. That means his condition has improved significantly since he was shot in the head during his July 23 gun battle with police. (Chris Lodatto,…
It’s no secret that the gentleman buying you tons of free drinks doesn’t give a crap about your health, safety, or even how much you like drinking. He’s just making a calculated investment, figuring that you’re more likely to have sex with him after you have $30 worth of vodka…
Two days after 14-year-old Deston Bibbs was killed by a hit-and-run motorist as he crossed Sycamore School Road at 9:20 p.m. on the night of April 25, his mother went to the media with a heartfelt plea. “Just turn yourself in already,” DeShundria Parks told WFAA’s Carla Wade. “There’s no…
Arnold Troy Crayton has matured a lot in the past decade. Back then, he was “Lil’ Arnold,” a 21-year-old junior member of a Fort Worth-based crack distribution ring busted by the feds in 2002. Now, according to federal prosecutors, Crayton’s moved on to marijuana, apparently smuggled to him straight from…
To be fair, the man couldn’t have known Antonio Quintanilla was a cop. It was 3 a.m., and Quintanilla wasn’t in uniform. He was just some guy smoking a cigarette on the balcony of the apartment below at the Villas of Katy Trail early on Saturday morning. That said, Quintanilla’s…
Dafe Kelly Sokoh wasn’t technically supposed to be patrolling the Burger King parking lot. El Rancho Supermarket in Oak Cliff hired him as a security guard to keep an eye on things there, but, when he spotted 26-year-old Roy Castillo leaving the grocery store at what he considered to be…
By the time firefighters showed up at the Newport Landing Apartments in Far Northeast Dallas on Tuesday, Lesley Williams’ had already escaped from her burning unit, running outside and calling for help until a neighbor was able to douse the flames that still covered her body. Her hands, back and…
