For eight years, Sheldrick Newton worked a menial job at Dallas’ Central Library while harboring larger ambitions. “I am a very talented person and can fit just about any part,” he wrote in his ExploreTalent.com profile. “[M]ost people see me as a person who could possibly put a movie or…
Over winter break during the 2007-08 school year, Robert Lange, then a social studies teacher at Williams High School in Plano, twice had sex with a high school student at a martial arts studio. The girl was 18, the sex was consensual, and she wasn’t his pupil but a student…
Folks in Oak Cliff have been pushing for an Oak Cliff dog park for a while now. More specifically, they’ve been lobbying the city to pitch in for a permanent one, since they have the pop-up thing down by now. Yesterday brought good news. According to a post on FIDO…
Last week a jury found 68-year-old Jackie Don Burke guilty of one count of unlicensed sale of firearms. According to Burke’s own records he sold 135 firearms in 14 months, because if you’re gonna do it then why not do it big? One of those firearms was a pistol the…
A few weeks ago, one of the digital billboards on I-30 leading west into downtown flashed a message congratulating Sarah Colmark on a successful first year at WRR 101.1 FM, Dallas’ classical music radtio station. Colmark was hired as general manager last January, nearly a full two years after the…
To say that rocker/maniac Ted Nugent is not a fan of Barack Obama would be something of an understatement. Take this quote, which he screamed to fans at a concert while brandishing a pair of machine guns: “Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these you punk,”…
From SMU’s crime logs, we bring you a brief, somewhat disturbing, deeply weird police report: at 8:18 last night, campus police reported that a student was “was assaulted and held against his will” at the university’s Sigma Phi Epsilon house. The case is being classified as “Aggravated Assault/Aggravated Kidnapping/Personal Hazing…
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Dallas ISD police Chief Craig Miller wasted no time in dismissing the thought of arming teachers. In fact his recommendations for making DISD students safer, which he will present to the Board of Trustees at a briefing on Thursday, involve…
The bakers union’s new president has finally broken his silence following the collapse of Irving-based Hostess, baker of Wonder Bread and Twinkies. It was the bakers, after all, who largely sat out the attempted restructuring in a New York federal bankruptcy court, then dynamited the negotiations by striking last November…
Don’t think about this: your city manager, the CEO of Dallas City Hall, signed a secret deal five years ago promising to help a gas company set up drilling rigs and processing plants in city parks. Think about this instead: the city manager did not sign a secret agreement with…
On Saturday night, a few minutes before 8 p.m., 20-year-old Shatara Robinson was walking from the CityPlace DART station to a restaurant on McKinney Avenue, where she was planning to meet family for dinner. She was on the sidewalk when she was approached by Rodney Jones, a wild-haired 46-year-old dressed…
In the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the guns-in-schools debate in Texas has focused on teachers: whether to arm them; what training they should receive; whether it’s better to shoot or ask questions first; etc. But limiting the use of firearms on campus to trained, presumably…
At 4 a.m., an Officer Zane Murray with the Dallas Police Department spotted two men along Stemmons Freeway loading bridge-building materials — $6,400 in large aluminum plates and overhang brackets belonging to Archer Western, a TxDOT contractor — from a construction site into the bed of their 18-year old Dodge…
Stacey Hargraves was pulling in $300 per week from his job in the sanitation department at Mary Kay, but it never seemed to stretch far enough to support his wife, children and his propensity to gamble and go to sporting events. And so, according to the FBI, he walked into…
A hacker using the handle “Guccifer” hacked the email accounts of several members of the Bush family, including the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, Bush 43’s sister. Among the leaked information are a lot of home numbers and addresses for Bush family members and their kids, and two pictures…
When Dallas County commissioners meet on Tuesday, they will decide whether to part with a rather unusual piece of county property: a black, 75-pound pot-bellied pig. The swine, identified only by his serial number, 12-167125, is being kept at the Kennedy Livestock Center outside Hutchins, where the county stables stray…
In November, Mayor Mike Rawlings took a stroll down Bishop Avenue to inaugurate its status as a complete street, the term of art for roadways designed as much to welcome pedestrians, cyclists and small-scale retail as to accommodate cars. It was a consummation of sorts of the city’s prolonged flirtation…
By now, it’s barely recognizable as a piece of art: an eight-foot-tall ribbon of rusted steel scrawled with obscene graffiti, running through an obscure stretch of grassland on the eastern edge of downtown. It fades into the background now, ignored by commuters and passersby. That wasn’t the original vision when…
Texas parents beware: your children are being “imperiled” by “abortion peddlers” who want to teach them “sex education.” No. No, they’re not. Although at some point someone might want to teach them to put a condom on a banana, and conservative lawmakers, predictably, want to make damn sure that person’s…
On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza, a half hour before he was scheduled to deliver a 1 p.m. speech at the Dallas Trade Mart. The words were never passed Kennedy’s lips, but the speech survived and, a month later, was printed and bound into…
Yesterday, the city of Dallas presented its new vision for downtown Dallas parks. As the Morning News pointed out, the plan calls for the amount of green space in and around the Central Business District to roughly double over the next several years. That includes four “priority parks” — Pacific…
The folks at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science are excellent at putting together infotaining science exhibits. They are not so good at handling a minor PR challenge. That much became clear when, on December 30, a museum patron was injured. A week later, pressed by the Morning News,…
