Teena Mathis has always said it was an accident. She had left her 15-month-old niece, Heidi, with her children on a backyard swingset while she stepped inside to answer the phone. While she was in the house, the girl wandered behind the swing, which hit her in the head. Heidi…
Hang on to your hats, everybody, because I’m about to give you a super-duper exciting glimpse into the inner workings of the Dallas Observer. We get a lot of email from our readers. Some of it comes directly to our various email addresses, but a lot of it goes to…
Goat Island Preserve is a comma of 348 acres hugging the Trinity River as it meanders through an unincorporated portion of far southeastern Dallas County. It’s surrounded by gravel pits and crisscrossed with crude four-wheeler trails but is otherwise a rather wild and seldom visited tangle of land. County officials…
Last night, the Dallas ISD Board of Trustees approved a resolution “opposing legislative efforts to diminish graduation standards and academic rigor.” Basically, they don’t like HB 5, the Texas House of Representatives-approved bill that would reduce the number of tests students take to graduate, and basically create separate college- and…
The Morning News’ David Moore put it gently when he wrote that the Cowboys’ selection of Wisconson center Travis Frederick in the first round of the NFL draft is “not likely to satisfy [the] fan base.” The football cognoscenti had predicted he’d be a second or third round pick. Even…
We somehow missed this in the chaotic aftermath of last week’s Boston Marathon bombing, partly because we don’t watch the news with closed captioning on, partly because we don’t follow Zooey Deschanel on Twitter. But local Fox affiliate KDFW seems to have labeled the 33-year-old actress/indie songstress/Apple pitchwoman as an…
First, the good news. According to a report just released by the American Lung Association, the air in Dallas-Fort Worth has gotten considerably cleaner in recent years. The average number of days with unhealthy levels of ozone has been cut in half over the past decade, and the concentration of…
The men and women who gathered alongside Central Expressway this morning to protest the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center were mostly well-behaved. They marched by peacefully by in their Jason-esque hockey masks, Guantanamo prison garb and comically oversize papier mache heads. But then something went wrong. A…
Back in March, after a grand jury declined to indict him on charges of rape, former Highland Park High School student Ryan Romo sued his accuser and her family. The complaint alleged five separate counts of misconduct, leveled at different family members. Among them: malicious prosecution, negligence and vicarious liability,…
When police officers raided former Kaufman County Justice of the Peace Eric Williams’ Seagoville storage shed earlier this month, amongst the guns and other items they found a white, four-door Ford Crown Victoria that they were pretty sure had been the getaway car in the March 30 murder of District…
The most interesting of the three institutions that comprise the sprawling George W. Bush Presidential Center at SMU is the museum, which is filled with artifacts from the former president’s life. There’s the bullhorn he used to address first responders from the rubble of Ground Zero in 2001, the windbreaker…
At 10 a.m. today, the tweets and media reports previewing the George W. Bush Presidential Center in increasingly granular detail will reach a crescendo as the center is dedicated. Every media outlet in the known universe is there, which explains your exploding Twitter feed. Unfair Park is the exception. The…
Last week, Texas Alliance for Life paused briefly in its crusade to enact increasingly onerous abortion restrictions and shifted its focus to the other end of the human lifespan. The group urged its supporters to lobby for passage of SB 303, state Senator Bob Deuell’s bill to reform end-of-life care…
The corpse of the Bowl Championship Series, college football’s much-maligned way of wrapping up each season in often incomprehensible fashion, has gone cold. The organization that will replace it now has a clever name — the College Football Playoff — that leaves plenty of room for a big-dollar corporate sponsor…
Houston Riverside General Hospital specialized in the kind of medicine its better-heeled brethren did their best to avoid: treating the poor, the mentally ill, the drug-addled. So it’s no surprise that the 95-year-old nonprofit — formerly known as Houston Negro Hospital — shared the same broken finances as the people…
Just after 2 a.m. Monday, a young Hispanic woman walked to a walk-up cigarette shop on Ann Arbor Avenue. Her boyfriend had taken her car, she told the person behind the window, and she needed a phone to call 911. She had the phone when two men drove up in…
It was the middle of the night when the girl, 12, peeked her head around her bedroom door and saw the man coming up the stairs. He was a stranger, tall and with a gap between his teeth. He made her take off her shirt before he tied her up…
The Texas Education Agency will go ahead with a new performance rating system, Education Commissioner Michael Williams announced on Tuesday. The new system will score schools on an A to F scale in hopes of closing the achievement gap between white and minority students. “I have heard the criticism of…
Are you excited about the George W. Bush Presidential Center? We’re so excited. Not quite excited enough to fight our way through the throng of ex-presidents and “Bush-Cheney Alumni” attending the dedication tomorrow, but pretty goddamn enthused nonetheless. So, it appears, are a few SMU students and some random non-affiliated…
Six years ago, wooing a high-profile commencement speaker was the last thing on Paul Quinn College’s to-do list. The southern Dallas school, the city’s only historically black college, was in disrepair, physically and academically, after years of mismanagement. With its accreditation set to be revoked, the entire institution was about…
A couple of speakers showed up at the 1500 Marilla this morning to ask that the City Council to hold off on a fast-moving proposal to rename the Dallas Convention Center after recently retired U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison. Former councilwoman Sandra Crenshaw called for a public hearing before any…
It’s freezing in New York–where the hell is global warming?— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2013 It’s cold this morning. Not quite freezing like in New York, but it’s 40 degrees. In North Texas. In late April. It’s a little odd, a bit of a surprise. Less surprising: That…
