By most accounts, Steve Abraira did a decent job as Dallas’ fire chief. He served for five years, was well-respected by the rank-and-file, and ran a department with no glaring issues. But somewhere along the line, he crossed City Manager Mary Suhm, who issued an ultimatum: resign or be fired…
As day breaks in North Texas, residents are surveying the devastation wreaked by last night’s storms. Dallas escaped the worst of it. The tornado sirens by our place just south of White Rock got going around 9 p.m. and kept on for a half hour, but we saw nothing but…
If he has his act together, Lyndon has already powered on in the copy room by the time the bell for first period rings, and has already begun the long, slow trek down the school’s single hallway, arriving at his first class, chemistry, before the tardy bell rings five minutes…
This is a weird one. The story comes to us via Reddit (of course), where a resident of an apartment complex near State and Thomas streets in Uptown writes that he’s distressed by the appearance of a strange chalk marking on his door. “I noticed today that my door had…
On Monday, Irving police investigators were tipped off that a U-Haul truck containing a sizable batch of drugs was parked somewhere inside the city. They found the truck in front of a closed business on Irving Boulevard, so officers set up shop, hanging back and watching to see if someone…
As inventive as human beings can be, we’ve never come up with a solid way to keep dogs from mournfully licking their unhealed junk after being neutered. The ubiquitous Elizabethan collar or Cone of Shame, if you will, does the trick but inevitably destroys a pet’s self-esteem in the process…
Marijuana advocates were abuzz last month — and by “abuzz” we mean excited, of course — when a bill to reduce penalties for marijuana possession was passed out the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. The bill had been watered down to apply only to people younger than 21, but the…
By the time Josh Hamilton packed his bags and set off for the West Coast and a $125 million paycheck, no one was particularly sad to see him go. His epic late-season collapse, neatly encapsulated by that botched fly ball, as well as his energy-drink binges and general histrionics, had…
As we write this, the world’s top golfers not named Tiger are descending on Irving for the Byron Nelson Championship. It’s a big deal, one of the region’s biggest sporting events and driver of an estimated $35 million in economic activity. But before play begins on Thursday, the city of…
For the record, the jailer in the above photo no longer works for Dallas County. Rachel Leigh Graham lost her job and pleaded guilty to official oppression for slamming her handcuffed charge into the tile floor of the Lew Sterrett jail. But that doesn’t make the video, seen below in…
Police don’t make a habit of blasting out the names and faces of 17-year-old crime suspects, but the Irving Police Department made an exception for Travis Lekas. The Nimitz High School student was arrested Monday on charges that he drugged a fellow student and forced her into prostitution. According to…
Yesterday, the Dallas Police Department has blanketed its Facebook page with a portrait and brief biography of every officer killed in the line of duty over the past 121 years. The procession of 80 mostly young faces is a somber reminder of how dangerous a job policing is. A handful…
Last Saturday, the folks taking in the new George W. Bush Presidential Center were briefly under the frightening misimpression that it had come under terrorist attack, as reports of an “active shooter” put the center and SMU on lockdown. Among the visitors were Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The…
We could report this one out and inform you that Optimus Prime’s cameo at Main Street Garden this afternoon was part of a promotion for Transformers Thirtysomething, but we’d rather just assume Downtown Dallas Inc. was rolling out the newest member of their downtown security patrol. Those pooping dogs over…
Neighbors were growing concerned about the fate of Pemberton Spring. In recent months, surveyors with the city had come within spitting distance of the site as they drilled soil samples and staked out buildings for $10 million Texas Horse Park. They feared the imminent disappearance of the spring, which has…
Washington is still reeling from the revelation on Friday that the IRS has been singling out Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. The news immediately drew howls of bipartisan protest, and pretty much everyone agrees that using the tax system to target political enemies is not what happens in a…
If there’s one thing everyone in America can agree on this morning, it’s that Kermit Gosnell is disgusting and belongs in an especially dank and fetid section of some sort of subterranean prison. In a case that millions of talking heads have been shouting at you about from your TV,…
The media has had a hard time labeling Barrett Brown. “Anonymous spokesman” doesn’t fit because Anonymous is too anarchic and loosely organized to have a spokesman. For the same reason, he’s not the collective’s “self-proclaimed” spokesman, though he did have more than his share of media appearances. The best option…
The man who knocked on David Goldman’s door at 9:30 last night didn’t look like trouble. He was fairly young, in his mid-20s, “dressed neat, clean-shaven and (with) a good haircut,” the 76-year-old later told police, and he asked the price on the 1996 Mercedes for sale in the driveway…
Justin Grogg was in town from Panama City on a business trip when he and a colleague went out on the town to sample the local fare. They went to the Red Lobster at Stemmons and Northwest Highway, and Grogg ordered a Budweiser. Grogg says it took only a second…
Klyde Warren — the park, not the kid — was still just a twinkle in the city’s eye when Mayor Tom Leppert unveiled plans to kick the cars off the Continental Avenue bridge and transform it into a linear park over the Trinity River. The original plan was to have…
The last time the Mavericks overhauled their uniforms it was 2001, and Dirk was still a scrawny, clean-cut German import flanked by Steve Nash and Michael Finley. The previous design was two decades old and carried the reek of futility of the early ’90s. There have been a few minor…
