One evening last month, police invited reporters to an empty lot at Lancaster Road and Interstate 20, an area frequented by the sex workers who serve the long-haul truckers that pass through. The goal was to showcase Dallas’ successful and innovative prostitution diversion program and to encourage the nationwide adoption…
When Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse convinced a jury to convict a former Justice of the Peace on felony theft charges, Eric Lyle Williams said his life was effectively ruined over a “misunderstanding” and a “political grudge.” County information technology personnel came into the Kaufman sub-courthouse on a…
The headline summarizes what we know at this point pretty well. According to Fox 4, the man you see abandoning his car in the picture above shot and killed his girlfriend and unborn child today in the 12300 block of Hoblitzelle Drive in the Hamilton Park neighborhood of Northeast Dallas…
Neighbors and pizza aficionados have been eagerly awaiting the opening of Jay Jerrier’s second Cane Rosso, planned for Grand and Gaston just south of White Rock Lake, since word of its existence first leaked in November. It was slated to open in the middle of April — just about now,…
After Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife were gunned down in their home last month, just two months after McLelland’s deputy, assistant DA Mark Hasse, was murdered in broad daylight, law enforcement officials pledged to search far and wide to bring the killer, or killers, to justice…
A lot of men convicted by Dallas County have walked free over the past dozen years — 44, according to the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations. District Attorney Craig Watkins has made the liberation of innocent prisoners his personal mission, as well as his ticket to national fame…
On Tuesday, Eric told you about a DISD sixth-grader who was arrested at his school, DISD’s Learning Alternative Center for Empowering Youth, after attempting to steal $4 from a classmate. After his target felt the sixth-grader’s hand in his pocket and pulled away, the frustrated would-be thief knocked him to…
RT @psychscriv: Make sure none of these people have seats in 2014. twitter.com/PsychScriv/sta…We are in trouble when these Rs side w/ Sen Reid— Barry Smitherman (@SmithermanTX) April 11, 2013 The U.S. Senate voted only to consider gun safety legislation Thursday, which includes expanded background checks and increased penalties for illegal…
Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the advocacy group funded and founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, is struggling to stoke the kind of grass-roots passion for gun regulation that has made its arch-nemesis, the NRA, such a political force. Organizing For America, the post-electoral version of Obama’s campaign machine,…
When a pantsless young man runs into his backyard in the wee hours of the morning and shines a laser pointer at a police helicopter overhead, criminal charges are sure to follow. But what if you’re in a Walmart checkout line fully clothed and decide to test that new light-emitting…
The woman on the line was frantic. She had been kidnapped the day before and didn’t know where she was, she told the 911 operator. She just knew she was in a house with one of her captors and could see a parked Dodge pickup from the tiny bathroom window…
There’s a robust debate, and a small handful of legislative proposals, aimed at reforming a school disciplinary system that charges hundreds of thousands of students each year with misdemeanors for things like chewing gum or wearing too much perfume. What happened today at DISD’s alternative school, formally known by the…
Around 5:30 this morning, 29-year-old Tomas Cavazos developed a serious beef with a pile of trash. A neighbor called police to report that the man appeared to be shooting the hell out of some debris in his front yard. Police arrived at a house in West Dallas to find the…
There are some large and generally predictable drawbacks to living a stone’s throw from Vickery Meadows’ Five Points intersection, which is a notorious hotbed of crime. Steve Parker learned as much soon after moving into his Hemlock Avenue condo in 2008. Things started innocuously enough when someone kicked a hole…
A couple weeks back, we gave you an update on the unlucky Liberty County couple still trying to sue the self-proclaimed psychic who wrongly told police they had a huge mass grave filled with tiny dead children on their property. Presley “Rhonda” Gridley, who the couple alleges is the psychic…
It was Independence Day 2011 when the boy and his father went to the abandoned shell of a house in rural Ellis County. They hoped they might find the treasure that was rumored to be buried there, but came up empty handed. What they found instead was a refrigerator, which…
U.S. Representative Steve Stockman is not a subtle man. We could go so far as to say he has a flair for the dramatic. He is, after all, the man who brought Ted Nugent as his plus-one to the State of the Union address, and compared the Earth to a…
A week ago Sunday, Justin Mark Stanert made a cameo on TheDirty.com, Nik Richie’s rather lurid crowd-sourced gossip site. By the standards of the site, the allegations against Stanert were tame. No nude photos, no rumors of liaisons with underage transexual prostitutes, just a report that he and his girlfriend…
Last year, nine years after the Prison Rape Elimination Act was passed, the federal government laid out final rules aimed at stamping out sexual abuse in America’s criminal justice system, with specific provisions for juvenile lockups. Dallas County’s Juvenile Department applied for and was recently awarded a federal grant of…
Inside First Baptist of Sunnyvale, Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland lay in a flag-draped coffin alongside the ashes of his wife, Cynthia. That was fitting in a sad way, their friends said, because they knew one wouldn’t want to go on without the other. Hundreds of friends, colleagues and…
This week, we’ve given you a little background on the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and some reasons why two experts familiar with the gang are skeptical that they could be behind the murders of Kaufman County DA Mark McLelland, his wife Cynthia, and ADA Mark Hasse. In short: because while…
Every day, Dallas police respond to a disheartening number of domestic violence calls, too many to note. In 2011, there were 13,000 instances of family violence, most of them assaults. Last year, 26 women were murdered by their partners. Yesterday’s alleged thuggery took police to Great Trinity Forest Boulevard, where…
