Early yesterday morning, around 4 a.m., Dallas police responded to a call at a Red Bird apartment complex: A 20-year-old woman, Shakeydra Freeney, was dead inside one of the units, having been shot in the face with a shotgun. There wasn’t any clear indication at the time of who’d killed…
Usually, catching a theft suspect takes at least a small amount of detective work. But Luis Paz made things easy for police, laying out a trail of bread crumbs at 10:30 Wednesday night leading directly to the front door of his Northwest Dallas home. To be accurate, it wasn’t actually…
Oak Cliff Fights, a new and wildly popular Facebook page featuring user-submitted cell phone videos of mostly Hispanic teenagers brawling in the streets, is no more. It was taken down after WFAA aired its story in which LULAC leader Rene Martinez decries the youth culture that created it and City…
If the Keystone XL revelations have demonstrated anything, it’s that the people and companies revolving around the proposed continent-straddling mega-pipeline form an incestuous, revolving-door miasma, powering a conflict of interest-generating engine. We learned Wednesday from environmental network Friends of the Earth that the firm conducting the pipeline environmental impact study…
Helen Pigg was still relatively spry back in 2011, at least for an 81-year-old. She was healthy and active, the historian for an association of retired Richardson school teachers and a supporter, online at least, of various progressive causes from the abolition of nuclear weapons to attacks on Chick-fil-A for…
First, a trigger warning: If you count yourself among that small sliver of the human race for whom the sight of adorable baby animals induces uncontrollable retching, DO NOT PLAY THE ABOVE VIDEO. For the rest of you, enjoy the Fort Worth Zoo’s new Asian elephant, who was born on…
It doesn’t take much to impress a water engineer. For Robert Mace, an administrator at the Texas Water Development Board, the highlight of the year was gulping down a tall glass of lukewarm water. “It could have used a couple of ice cubes,” he says, but otherwise it was clean…
When WFAA’s Jonathan Betz announced in May that he was leaving the station after five years to work in New York. The only question was For whom?. “I can’t say exactly where I’ll be working yet, but I’ll still be doing the news,” he cryptically told Uncle Barky at the…
Officer Craig Hermans hasn’t been arrested or charged in the federal investigation into an alleged steroid ring at the Arlington Police Department that’s already led to the indictment of one colleague and the suicide of another. But he was questioned in connection with the investigation and remains on administrative leave…
San Antonio’s Northside ISD, which became the focus of national controversy when an intensely evangelical high school sophomore refused to wear her RFID-equipped student ID because it was the Mark of the Beast, is not the first school district to track students’ whereabouts using geolocation technology, nor will it be…
A procession of Texas Parks and Wildlife trucks pulled slowly past Sharon Anderton’s home in southern Hunt County not long after daybreak. They carried ATVs and pulled short trailers that, for now at least, were empty. As Anderton caught the scene on video, a child could be heard in the…
As expected, the Texas House passed new, restrictive abortion restrictions this afternoon, sending them on to the Senate for final approval, but not before Democrats could launch a statewide bus tour, and not before this pro-choice protester could scream at lawmakers from the gallery. Unlike the clamor that arose after…
Grand Park, Frisco’s planned $23-million, 275-acre paradise of the outer-ring ‘burbs, will probably be contaminated with lead, and staffers at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality know it, according to documents and emails obtained by Frisco Unleaded. As we’ve reported before, the park’s lake and water features will be fed…
Since Congress started wrestling with stricter gun control laws early this year, school officials around the country have been on edge about how to handle threats of violence from students. There have been a lot of draconian responses in the last few months. In one case, an eighth-grader in West…
The Swiss Avenue Place Apartments, near the intersection with Peak Street, are several blocks and several social rungs away from the ritzy end of the East Dallas boulevard. The cars aren’t as nice, the surrounding homes not as well kept. There’s a lot more crime, too, mostly car break-ins, domestic…
The Texas House just passed sweeping abortion restrictions. Once they pass the senate, the procedure will be banned 20 weeks post-fertilization, and all but five abortion providers in the state will be forced to close thanks to a medically unnecessary requirement that they meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers…
Walter Lippman-Avilez was hoping for a quick traipse through customs when he stepped off his Aeromexico flight from Mexico City just after 1 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. The Guatemalan’s previous trip to the U.S. had gone smoothly enough, after all, and he saw no reason why this one shouldn’t be…
Expert Global Solutions. It’s got one of those corporate-speak, nonsense names just nebulous enough to defy Yellow-Pages categorization. But it is, among many other things, a debt collector — the biggest around, in fact — and it’s headquartered in Plano, where the Federal Trade Commission says it has been harassing…
Police still don’t know who bound, gagged and murdered 6-year-old Alanna Gallagher, whose naked body was found wrapped in heavy plastic along a Saginaw street last week. Their road blocks and search warrants have so far turned up nothing conclusive. In the meantime, the media now have a new, probably…
Dallas congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson has co-sponsored legislation that would establish a national historic park on the moon, to commemorate the United States’ initial moon landings and to protect those sites from future commercial moon explorers. In other words: Even on the moon, location, location, location…
Per the rules of the Texas legislature’s special session, Governor Rick Perry can add any agenda items that he thinks need to be addressed, with abortion taking a pretty comfortable lead over anything else. Otherwise, any bills the legislators file right now are in free-floating purgatory. In a show of…
Every time we broach the subject of improving Dallas ISD, the chorus starts in before we get too far: It starts with the parents. District officials appear to agree. In a recent vote, the district earmarked $2.75 million for parent-education programs, including the expansion of an Israeli-born program that helps…
