News

On the surface, it looked like just another Monday on the fifth floor of the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts building. Potential jurors warmed the benches, waiting for their chances to do their duty. In one of the four courts on the south wing, a lone TV news cameraman aimed his…

Enough for a ticket? It’s easy to think Fredrick “Lico” Reyes is joking when he tells you he’s suing the Texas Rangers for 35 bucks. Hard to take seriously a man who sends legal documents accompanied by photos of himself dressed as a construction worker (named Manuel Labor) and a…

Walk into the Cathedral of Hope during Sunday services, and the first thing you will likely notice is the number of couples holding hands as they worship together — women locking fingers with women, men with other men. They do so rising and sitting, singing, and approaching the altar to…

Rachel Pantoja — cherubic, strawberry blond, and surprisingly self-possessed for a 12-year-old — whips around in her swivel chair as she awaits her turn at the mike in a recording studio in North Dallas. Rachel, whose idea of a good time is squirting lemonade at her friends from a toy…

The explosion of the battering ram splintering a heavy front door jarred the predawn stillness in Plano last Thursday. Seventeen SWAT officers of the Plano Police Department rushed into the fashionable two-story house in their search for the elusive homeowner, Michael Lee Davis. With the SWAT team were Plano Detective…

The direct-marketing mailer sounded too good to be true: You too could be become a global entrepreneur realizing untold wealth from the Internet simply by turning “your Web site into a 24-hour credit card order-taking machine” and selling vast quantities online of whatever product you wished. All you had to…

Linda Earnhart is still disturbed by what she saw the Thursday morning before Memorial Day, when her concepts of safe neighborhoods and the innocence of children were so balefully tainted. “I woke up about 5 o’clock, and I just knew something was wrong,” Earnhart recalls. “I knew my dog was…

It is the last Saturday night in May, and several hundred “velvet-heads” — the fans, owners, and trainers of hunter-jumper horses — are gathered on the warped wooden bleachers of a show barn on Royal Lane in Irving. One by one, 30 or so high-strung horses enter the main ring…

Without a doubt, the Dallas school board is the most scorned body of elected officials in this city. In the course of a week, one could scarcely find a person who had anything good to say about it. A few sample sound bites: “The most pathetic, incompetent group of people…

Cheap eats Spend a few million city dollars on a dubious flood-control plan or an arena for sports team owners, and The Dallas Morning News will call you a visionary. Spend a few bucks on a chewy omelet and fruit plate, and beware its wrath. Is it just Buzz, or…

Drenched in sweat from head to toe, 3-year-old Tate Sherrod writhes and moans as his pale blue eyes flash with terrified distress. Nurses in the Grapevine office of Dr. Constantine Kotsanis try to keep Tate still by wrapping his small body mummy-like in a blanket, with only one slender arm…

On a clear December morning, a local doctor runs through a visual exercise with a patient. The physician holds in front of the man’s face a stick painted with black stripes; he then instructs the patient to follow the stick with his eyes. There is not a sound in the…

Back in December, before her club got in deep with the taxman, Elizabeth Edwards described neighborhood opposition to her Lower Greenville nightclub as “kind of like a tsetse fly…It goes away eventually.” So, it seems, has Edwards. The club, the much-ignored Palace and Moonshine Cafe, has apparently contracted a bad…

Was it something we said? For the record, we here at the Dallas Observer do not have cooties. OK, maybe that statement is a bit broad. Let’s just say that none of the people we let speak on our behalf in public has cooties as far as Buzz knows. So…

Death Mask of Exposition Park Can I toss in my two cents? OK, thanks. First of all, I don’t always agree with Christina Rees, but I happen to think she is an excellent writer who has a great way with words. As far as if she was actually correct in…

Shortly after sunrise one day last August, the doorbell rang at the home of Marty and Mary Ann Markowitz in northwest Garland. It was 7:30 a.m., which, by sane folks’ standards, is a bit too early for casual neighborly visits. But Spring Park, an exceedingly convivial community, is not like…

Like most people, Glenda Matheny didn’t know much about hepatitis B, but when the family pediatrician recommended that her then-14-year-old daughter, Breonna, start receiving a three-dose vaccine against the virus, Glenda figured it had to be done. Breonna handled the first shot without incident. But on January 17, 1995, immediately…

For the past 10 days, the gaming press and the ION Storm alumni grapevine have been vibrating like a coin-operated bed at a sleazy motel. First, May 24, came the flying-to-California rumor. According to former ION employees, the previous Friday the chiefs at Eidos, the London-based game publisher that has…

Legislators had been in Austin barely long enough to break in their leather chairs when Comptroller Carole Rylander confirmed that the state was enjoying a robust budget surplus. Enough money would be available to pay for all current expenses with a couple or three billion dollars left over for good…

Observer to U.S.A.: Don’t hate us Seems we’ve done more harm than good. That is, if you believe the dozens of readers who have sent us thank-you notes in recent weeks, expressing their gratitude for getting Rocco Pendola fired from KTCK-AM (1310). Now, we never took credit for getting Pendola…

Rees in pieces I knew there was a reason that I kept an archive of old Dallas Observer articles, and Christina Rees’ last one on the Exposition Park galleries must have been that reason [“Critics’ choice,” Framed, May 20]. I know that this is my second letter to you on…