In an East Dallas efficiency roughly the size of the prison cell where he once lived, John Whiteman has finally found a home. His neighbors in the rundown apartment building are former inmates like him. The apartments are like dorm rooms at what would be a very seedy college. A…
When the FBI announced in November that it had taken down a Pleasant Grove drug ring, it buried the lede. Yes, the vague allegations of kidnapping and gave the story a bit more juice than the bust of a typical alligator-less street-level drug ring, and casually pointing out that one…
For a former Dallas vice cop set to head to federal prison this summer it was, as it was for Richard Nixon, not about the crime, but about the cover up. Jose Luis Bedoy was convicted in October of telling a prostitute with whom he was having a relationship to…
On a late Monday night in 2013, police pulled over Brian Michael Hunter for making an unsafe lane change. He was arrested on old warrants and taken to the City Detention Center, which is run by the City Marshal’s Office, and placed in solitary confinement. The next morning, city jail…
A woman arrested Monday by Balch Springs police allegedly joined pastors at her church in starving a toddler the group believed to be demon-possessed then tried to resurrect the child in a “raising ceremony” after he died on March 22, according to The Dallas Morning News. Areceli Meza, who served…
The man who menaced South Dallas with a series of sexual assaults over the summer of 2013 will spend at least the next 30 years in prison. Van Dralan Dixson, captured in Baton Rouge in September 2013, attacked women at night. Carrying a gun he said he used to do…
As much of the nation still reels from the death of Walter Scott, a South Carolina man shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager, the Texas House of Representatives considered mandating body cameras for the state’s police officers Thursday. Slager was charged with murdering Scott on Tuesday after…
“This is funny shit,” Assistant Chief Billy Getzendaner said after he watched a video of a trainee volunteer firefighter being sodomized with a link of sausage by a group of other volunteers, a warrant issued for Getzendaner’s arrest in Ellis County claims. Getzendaner, 34, and Gavin Satterfield, the 31-year-old chief…
As Unfair Park should have made clearer in our report Tuesday about Ellis County volunteer firefighters accused of sexually assaulting a trainee with a link of chorizo, the firefighters are not employed by the the city of Waxahachie or connected with Waxahachie’s 58-member professional fire department. Texas Rangers say the…
“I’m pregnant,” yells an unseen woman, surrounded by police officers, moments before one of the officers is seen throwing down his fist. The woman, Deanna Jo Robinson, says she was 38 weeks pregnant when she was arrested and punched by a Hunt County sheriff’s deputy on March 4. The event…
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…
