There hasn’t been a satisfying explanation as to why Michael Schmidt, a successful Dallas trial lawyer described by friends as a “good, good person,” barricaded himself in an Uptown apartment complex and opened fire on police while his 11-year-old daughter sat in his apartment. Probably, there never will be. But…
Just in case your resolve was slipping, or else that scene in The Wolf of Wall Street convinced you that crack is the gateway to fun and untold riches, we bring you the cautionary tale of Joel Flores. Flores, 36, and another man had were “kickin’ it” on Saturday night…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown has started coming down hard on officers who are too quick to resort to deadly force. He fired senior corporal Amy Wilburn, who shot an unarmed carjacking suspect last month. Same with Carden Spencer, the cop who opened fire on a mentally ill man in…
Update at 12:45 p.m.Police have identified the gunman as Michael Edward Schmidt, whom The Dallas Morning News describes as a “prominent” lawyer. Schmidt works for his dad, C.L. Schmidt, at The Schmidt Firm, a group of trial lawyers whose specialties range from car accidents to oil and gas litigation. The…
It was a chaotic scene overnight as emergency vehicles and news crews descended on the 3000 block of Hanger Avenue in Fort Worth. Details were scarce, but Fort Worth PD said that a 14-year-old boy had been shot in the face a few minutes before midnight on Thursday and that…
Earlier this month, the Dallas Police Department released figures that seemed to be encouraging for Dallas motorists. The DPD’s data showed that police have been slowly scaling down on traffic tickets over the years. In the most recent fiscal year, from October 2012 until September 2013, the DPD issued 37,000…
When, in the predawn hours on Christmas morning, a Grand Prairie police officer spotted a suspicious 1997 Honda driving through the Grand Peninsula neighborhood near Joe Pool Lake, he didn’t know the car was stolen, nor did he know the driver had a gun. “Whatever he was doing caught the…
Just before midnight on Christmas Eve, Gareth Long woke to a noise outside his bedroom door. He got out of bed, grabbed a handgun and went to investigate. In the hallway of his Cedar Hill home, Long’s attorney told The Dallas Morning News, he encountered a stranger. Several times, Long…
Something clearly didn’t quite wash with this Gian Carlo Donatelli guy. Here he was, inside a event-level area at the American Airlines Center, almost half an hour before the doors would open for the rest of Jay Z’s ticket-holding fans Saturday night. He flashed a Magna Carter All-Access World Tour…
In the this week’s cover story, we examined the case of Sonia Cacy, the Fort Stockton woman convicted in 1993 of setting her uncle ablaze with gasoline. In the years since, the evidence against her hasn’t withstood scrutiny. Cacy was paroled six years into a 99-year sentence based on expert…
On Thursday, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst became the latest Texas politician to insert himself into the debate over the sentence handed down to 16-year-old “affluenza” victim Ethan Couch, who killed four people during a drunken joy ride earlier this year. Days after gubernatorial candidates Greg Abbott and Wendy Davis chimed…
If you simply must have an authentic Hustle Gang T-shirt but can’t afford the $50 price tag, and if you aren’t put off by criminal activity, shoplifting isn’t a horrible option. If properly executed, a surprise grab-and-run operation, much like this 300-pound dude carried out at Mockingbird Station’s Victoria’s Secret…
Even after a wave of exonerations confirmed the fallibility of the criminal justice system, even after the state’s supply of lethal-injection drugs has been all but cut off by squeamish pharmaceutical companies, even as national support for capital punishment steadily declines, Texas remains enamored with the death penalty. In 2013,…
Dallas News | myFOXdfw.comKelvion Walker says he didn’t know he was sitting in a stolen car on December 9. He’d just hopped in the passenger seat of the Chevrolet Malibu driven by 19-year-old Reginald Robertson, whom he describes as a close friend. It came as a surprise, then, when Robertson…
Earlier this week, Tarrant County prosecutors were busy lamenting that they are unable to appeal the sentence handed down to 16-year-old Ethan Couch, who got 10 years’ probation and a stint in rehab for drunkenly running over four people in June. Under state law, only the defendant in juvenile cases…
Breath easy, North Texas. Come out of your fallout shelters and panic rooms. Let your children play in the front yard. After four months on the run, federal authorities have captured documented menace-to-society Lonnie L. Jones and locked him up. His crime? Stealing burritos. Federal prosecutors prefer to describe it…
An affluent Keller teen who killed four people while driving drunk and stoned on Valium has become the latest object of outrage. Ethan Couch, 16 at the time of the crash, was handed 10 years of probation, which will include a stint at a pricey rehab paid for by his…
It took a Parker County jury all of five minutes on Thursday to convict 44-year-old Dana Brock of burglary. The evidence, after all, was pretty incontrovertible. Surveillance video showed her stealing a weedwacker and power washer from an Aledo garage last May. But that’s not what made Brock famous. Last…
Smokin Dragon Gifts, with its wide array of smokes and smoking accessories, including a delightful selection of novelty pipes (see: Mario, Angry Birds, the “Despicable Me” minions) and a presumably high percentage of cash transactions, might seem like an ideal target for the criminally inclined. Bad idea. Robbers and shoplifters…
Police in Parker County had been watching Michael Fred Wehrenberg’s home for a month when, late in the summer of 2010, they received a tip from a confidential informant that Wehrenberg and several others were “fixing to” cook meth. Hours later, after midnight, officers walked through the front door, rounded…
There are some murders that are so carefully planned that police spend months or years trying to piece together clues. There are others in which the suspected killers, through carelessness or lack of foresight, practically walk themselves into the jail cell. The slaying of 31-year-old Jose Orta-Sanchez is decidedly in…
It’s been a traumatic and deeply strange week for Crawford and Mary Clay Gupton. After last week’s ice storm, someone sawed the lock off the gate of their Fort Worth backyard and stole Heidi, their greater Swiss mountain dog. Then the thief, using the handle dogthedogsaver, took to Reddit to…
