As the sun sank and the cold set in, Dallas PD mobile command centers idled in an empty lot behind a McDonald’s off Lancaster Road and I-20, a stopover on a trucking line for long haulers. Plainclothes and uniformed officers massed near one of the trailers, walled in by the…
We were going to take a pass on this one. We were going to ignore the press release Dallas police sent at 12:39 p.m. informing every media outlet in town that Thomas Lee Watkins III, the 20-year-old nephew of Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins, had been arrested for allegedly…
Dallas police patrol the area around Kidd Springs Park at various hours, in part to crack down on the frequent car burglaries, in part to be on the lookout for people using the park to drink and do drugs. That’s what one officer was doing at about 8:30 Tuesday morning…
File this one under things we’re surprised to learn didn’t happen 50 years ago: the folks at Texas Motor Speedway announced today that the National Rifle Association — as in the rabidly pro-gun lobbying group — is now the title sponsor of the NASCAR race there this spring. But no…
On Friday afternoon, Lieutenant Regina Smith walked away from the Lucille Baller fiasco with a five-day suspension for bringing discredit to the Dallas Police Department. It seems a fair enough sentence for conduct that, while demonstrating hilariously bad judgment, did no real damage to anyone save for those of us…
Dallas police officers Randolph Dillion and Jon Llewellyn were passing through an apartment complex on West Camp Wisdom Road at about 9 p.m. on December 9, 2011 when they spotted Melvin Williams from their squad car taking something — drugs, they suspected — from a man in a parked car…
One of human evolution’s oft-ignored benefits is a man’s ability to conveniently piss on whatever tree, shrub, brush pile, patch of concrete, patch of grass, building facade, or garbage can happens to be at hand. It’s liberating. But with great freedom comes danger. One potential pitfall was made clear to…
I’ve got a really tough day ahead…not looking forward to the decisions I will have to make on some officers careers— David O. Brown (@DPDChief) March 1, 2013 If you follow Dallas Police Chief David Brown on Twitter, you were greeted this morning with the ominous announcement above. We’re still…
SMU still hasn’t released many details about what happened at the Sigma Phi Epsilon house on the night of February 10, just that a student was “assaulted and held against his will” and that the fraternity, which also counts 19-year-old John David Mahaffey as a member, had been temporarily suspended…
In the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook, Don Dunn, the superintendent at Van ISD, 70 miles southeast of Dallas, sent a memo to parents explaining what the district was doing post-Sandy Hook to ensure students’ safety. These included adding school resource officers, brushing up on emergency drills, locking…
Gentlemen. Let’s get really real for a moment, shall we? It’s very unlikely that a woman on Craigslist wants to have sex with you. Or rather, it’s very unlikely that a woman on Craigslist wants to have sex with you for free. And when two women from Craigslist are proposing…
For about four months in 2007, Lakeith Fowler had a good con going. That May, the 32-year-old had hooked up with a supplier who began shipping case after case of the latest Nike sneakers at dirt-cheap prices. Fowler marked them up and sold them from his retail store, The World…
Yesterday morning, Highland Park High School was evacuated after school officials found a threatening note in a boys’ bathroom. It was the same boys’ bathroom where three similar notes had been found the month before. In all four cases, a search of the school revealed nothing. The danger became a…
When Mike Edwards opened a Condom Sense at Parker and Independence in Plano last month, he touted it as a way to pump new life into an aging strip center and help reinvigorate local retail. But as CBS 11’s J.D. Miles so, um, artfully put it, neighbors and religious leaders…
On Tuesday afternoon, shortly after hearing journalist Laura Ling address the Dallas chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women in Far North Dallas, Paul Quinn College President Michael Sorrell was pulled over by Dallas police. We know this because he Tweeted about it: Just got stopped by a Dallas…
Yesterday morning, a man walked into the Victoria’s Secret at Mockingbird Station, grabbed $2,000 worth of shirts, sweatshirts and sweatpants, then ran from the store into a waiting Dodge Durango. It was, the Morning News noted, the fourth such theft from the location in about as many months. They are…
Adrelos Sanchez Waters drew suspicion as soon as the woman at the baggage check-in counter in McAllen, Texas, all of seven miles from the Mexican border, checked in his two pieces of luggage. They were heavy, much too heavy to just contain clothes and toiletries. She contacted McAllen police, who…
Last Sunday, a man was out checking his hog traps in a pasture in rural Erath County, some 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, when he stumbled upon 43-year-old Ricky Stephens. Stephens was alive, but barely. He had been severely beaten and was covered in severe burns, the Stephenville Empire-Tribune…
As Texas’ prison population has declined in recent years and criminal justice advocates and fiscal conservatives alike have questioned the wisdom of locking people up for minor, non-violent drug and property offenses, Dawson State Jail has become a prime target for closure. Last month, a couple dozen sentencing reform and…
The Texas Department of Public Safety got itself in a bit of a public relations mess last October when state troopers in a helicopter tracking a red pickup suspected of smuggling illegal immigrants opened fire, killing two Guatemalans and raising inevitable questions about the appropriateness of a law enforcement agency…
Last summer brought us the story of Anson Chi, a Plano man who’s accused of trying to detonate a bomb next to a gas main on West Park Road. The bomb did go off, perhaps earlier than Chi was hoping; police believe it detonated while he was “tampering” with the…
An appeals committee at City Hall on Thursday upheld Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s decision to fire a 911 call-taker over her mishandling of a call last August. Angelia Herrod-Graham answered the 911 call from the mother of Deanna Cook, saying she hadn’t seen her daughter in two days and…
