Chris Olivera was for several years vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for Gamestop. Part of his job was serving as a public face and spokesman for the Grapevine-based video game retailer. He did that just fine. It was the other part of his job, processing invoices from…
It was a sweltering afternoon in early July when several DEA agents and police officers showed up at the house at 1215 Lebanon Avenue, a tiny, burnt-orange home fronting some railroad tracks in Oak Cliff. They weren’t sure what to expect. It was just a friendly knock-and-talk, meaning they had…
On Sunday evening, firefighters arrived at a natural gas well in rural Johnson County to find an SUV engulfed in flames. Inside was the body of Robert Excell Dodson II, 44, a father of three and the vice president of Dallas’ Buckley Oil Company. It was unclear how long he…
Update, January 29, 2013: A Dallas County grand jury has declined to indict Romo. On Tuesday, Ryan Adam Romo, an 18-year-old Highland Park High School senior and star baseball player, was charged with sexual assault of a child, a second-degree felony. Romo is accused of raping a HPHS classmate after…
Sixto Salinas and his 18-year-old daughter were about to enter Sunny Food Mart at 9 p.m. Tuesday when they were nearly knocked over by two men rushing out of the store. They gleaned from a witness inside that the two men had just robbed the store (police classified it as…
On Thursday afternoon, patrol officers performed a routine traffic stop in Oak Cliff. They found that the driver, 24-year-old Jesus Gonzalez, wasn’t wearing a seat belt, was driving without a license, and was in the country illegally. They also found a little bonus prize: 15 AK-style assault rifles in the…
Late Sunday night, at 10:37 p.m., 911 operator received a call from a storage facility on Willowbrook Road, a dilapidated stretch of office and warehouse space in Northwest Dallas. The caller, 22-year-old Trevis Henderson, said he was in a fight with two men who said he owed them money. The…
Steven Ray Milam’s long run as the “Handsome Guy Bandit” came to a sudden end on a rural Mississippi highway in January of this year, as the former casket salesman turned bank robber led local police on a chase along Interstate 10. Officers tried no less than three times to…
Danny Kirk, the founding pastor of Greater Sweethome Missionary Baptist Church in Forest Hill was inside the church this morning with his secretary and a janitor when car crashed through the side of the building. The precise details of what happened next are trickling out. A man exited the wrecked…
Two armed men held up the 7-Eleven on Zang and Colorado Sunday afternoon. As they made their getaway, Dallas Police were fanned out, searching for a vehicle matching the description given by witnesses. A police helicopter crisscrossed the area. It didn’t take long for officers to find them. What followed…
Yesterday, about an hour and a half before the Cowboys game kicked off, neighbors and passersby in the 1600 block of Kiest Boulevard in East Oak Cliff became alarmed when they saw a man walking down the sidewalk carrying a machete. Police arrived shortly thereafter to chat. The man didn’t…
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…
