Burglars are typically a harried lot. There’s only so much time between a window being smashed and police or an angry, gun-wielding property owner arrive to see what’s up. See also: The Librarians of America Just About Destroyed Wild Salsa on Saturday Night The person who broke into Wild Salsa,…
Yesterday afternoon at around 3 p.m., Dallas police were sent to check out a silver Pontiac sedan parked suspiciously in an Oak Cliff alley. Officers waited for the driver to pull away, then performed a traffic stop on the 2400 block of Brooklyn Avenue after the car made an illegal…
On Wednesday evening, at about 7 p.m., 35-year-old James Lowell Evans walked into the Tom Thumb at 315 Hampton Road, in Oak Cliff. He wandered around the store for a while before meandering over to the personal care aisle, where, according to the store’s loss prevention manager, he slipped seven…
It’s hard to forget Alan Todd May. He’s the Texas con man who, until his phone privileges were revoked, used to sell spaces in made-up trade shows from his Harris County prison cell, not to mention any number of more pedestrian financial misdeeds. His boldest scheme started in 2008, when…
Homeless people often get a bad rap, but when you’re about to get your ass kicked by a PCP-crazed attacker, an unemployed former Crip living on the street can be handy to have around. Dallas police officer Billy Taylor learned that first-hand last Tuesday in front of The Bridge homeless…
Last week, Collin County Sheriff’s deputies showed up at Hunt Elementary School in Murphy and hauled away 38-year-old PE teacher Todd Allen Reich. Reich, according to court documents, had sexually abused a female kindergartener, with his innocent-seeming back rubs in the open moving to his closed office, where he allegedly…
Last Wednesday night, police say, Justin Jones, 19, was being driven around Dallas in a stolen tan Nissan, occasionally getting out to rob people at gunpoint. One of the stops, in the early hours of Thursday morning, was at a Chinese food restaurant on Park Lane near Central Expressway. The…
This morning, McKinney Boyd High School Principal Rick McDaniel posted a brief note on Facebook alerting parents that a student had made unspecified “threatening statements” on the social networking site and had been arrested by McKinney Police.(Update at 1:50 p.m.: The post in question has been removed from the page)…
Last September, the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office began investigating what appeared to be discrepancies in traffic tickets tickets written by its deputies. Specifically, it looked at whether they had falsified information on traffic tickets written during officers’ normal shifts to make it appear that they were written while they were…
Just after midnight last Thursday morning, Donald Morrow was standing outside Sherlock’s on Central Expressway when his friend was approached by a man pointing a gun and demanding money. Morrow threw a punch, or tried to. In response, the gunman fired a single round that killed Morrow, then fled on…
It’s been open for scarcely more than a year, but Oddfellows has already received its share of ink in the Observer. Its mac ‘n’ cheese is the best in Dallas, as is its bloody mary. The Oak Cliff eatery won’t be earning similar plaudits anytime soon for securing its cash…
Tony Rand and his two boys, Greg and Bill, owe the government money, and a lot of it. Last year, they admitted that their humble family business, Aspen Exploration, was more of a Ponzi scheme that leveraged the company’s supposed oil and gas holdings to raise $100 million from investors…
Tarrant County jailers are breathing a collective sigh of relief: Ladies and gentlemen, Steven Lawayne Nelson has left the building. Convicted and sentenced to death for suffocating a 28-year-old Arlington preacher and suspected in the killing of a fellow inmate, Nelson’s new home is the Polunsky Unit in Polk County,…
It’s the kind incident that makes you want to take everyone you love to the gun range for lessons: A woman — we don’t know her age — is watching television upstairs a little before noon on Wednesday at her home, which isn’t far from Camp Wisdom Road and Interstate…
Last night, a group of people were standing outside Sherlock’s, a bar and restaurant in North Dallas, when a man approached. He carried a pistol and, according to police, he demanded money from someone. It was a moment many of us script in our heads when we read these types…
Around midnight today, Dallas police received a call about a man walking around West 10th Street in Oak Cliff, “wielding a large knife,” as the police report puts it. The caller said the man with the knife had, furthermore, phoned him up not long ago and said, “I’m going to…
Because of a new law passed in the last legislative session, Texas Department of Criminal Justice inmates are now faced with a choice when they need to see a doctor: pay a yearly $100 fee, or don’t go in for treatment at all. As the Texas Tribune reports today, many…
Update: Steven Lawayne Nelson, who was just handed a death sentence in the suffocation of an Arlington preacher, has flooded his holding cell and the courtroom, according to Star-Telegram reporter Dianna Hunt’s Twitter feed. She said he could be heard screaming as water began seeping into the courtroom. Original item:…
We heard last week from John Wiley Price, who responded defiantly in the feds’ ongoing effort to squeeze him on their way to a corruption case. It’s a hail mary, he said of investigators’ effort to sieze $229,000 found in a December raid, nothing more than an effort to “fill…
The house at 4823 Dolphin Road is a ramshackle affair in South Dallas all but engulfed by surrounding brush. For weeks, it had been the subject of near-constant complaints. Drugs were being sold there, neighbors said, and the loud music was rattling their nerves. So too was the resident who…
Elizabeth Escalona, the 23-year-old mother of five accused of torturing her two-year-old daughter Jocelyn Cedillo, has been sentenced to 99 years in prison, several news outlets are reporting. According to Scott Goldstein at the Dallas Morning News , one of several reporters who’s been live-tweeting the trial for the past…
Jennifer Ciravolo woke early Wednesday morning, knowing that day she would look into the face of the man accused of killing her brother in a Tarrant County jail. She got her sons dressed and packed for elementary school. Instead of the uniform she wears to her job as a cashier…
