Police & Law Enforcement

Bernie Tiede is now a free man, walking away from a life sentence after new evidence is presented.

There is a YouTube clip, jerky and brief, posted by his mother, showing Wilmer-Hutchins High School’s Troy Causey Jr. going head-to-head against Madison’s Johnathan Turner. Causey opens the game with a put-back jam. Turner responds with one on the other end. Two months later, on March 23, Dallas police say…

Keller, with its exurban tangle of big, fast streets, is not the most wonderful place to be a pedestrian. Not even in its subdivisions. Just ask the family of Robert Lariz-Trinidad, who was run over by a pickup on Thursday while pushing a wheelbarrow across a street so quiet it…

By Saturday night, the members of New York’s Finest Baseball Club will be be back home in the Big Apple, a place where neighbors look out for one another and people respect respect private property. It’ll be a relief to escape from Dallas, where the team of New York City…

When the Star-Telegram finally pried a comment from Fort Worth veterinarian Millard “Lou” Tierce on Wednesday, he dismissed allegations that he’d mistreated animals — specifically keeping a family’s supposedly euthanized dog alive for six months as a source for blood transfusions — as “all a bunch of hooey.” The state…

For 41 years, no Dallas police officer faced charges for an on-duty shooting. With Tuesday’s indictment of former officer Carden Spencer, there have been two in the past week. Spencer, if you’ll recall, shot a mentally ill man in a Rylie cul-de-sac in October. He and his partner said the…

Sir Young may have hated to say that he was a rapist, but he couldn’t deny it, either. “That’s rape,” he said in a recorded interview with a Dallas police detective, describing his encounter with a 14-year-old girl. Young was 18 at the time. They were both students at Booker…

Forty-one years ago, Dallas police officer Darrell Cain was charged with murder for killing 12-year-old Santos Rodriquez as he sat in the back of a squad car. Though there have been scores of police shootings since, that was the last time a Dallas cop was indicted for shooting a suspect…

Texas has much to recommend it. Friendly people, a robust economy, no state income tax, etc. It’s easy to see why someone would want to settle down here. That goes for ordinary, law-abiding citizens, and it goes for cold-case murder suspects from Pennsylvania. Twice in the past six months (and…

This post has been updated with additional comments from Wylie PD spokeswoman Donna Valdapena. Wylie is, according to the city’s official website, an idyllic place to live. “Why Wylie?” it asks before answering its own question with a series of exclamations: “Historic Downtown!” “Woodbridge Golf Club!” “Community Events!” “Summer Fun!”…

The so-far bloodless battle between open carry advocates and the city of Arlington continued Tuesday evening with a debate over whether guns should be banned at City Council meetings. Open Carry Tarrant County members, who showed up at Arlington City Hall by the dozens, said no. The Arlington City Council…

Jerry Temple is not the guy you want living in the apartment above you. Especially if you rely on a wheelchair, own a flat-screen TV and value your life. In Temple’s case, the unlucky neighbor was Kenneth Alberts, a 59-year-old disabled man who lived alone in a Grapevine apartment complex…

Dallas PD’s remarkable seven-month streak of not fatally shooting a suspect ended on Monday afternoon, when multiple officers gunned down a man outside Southwest Center Mall. Police say that Michael Mayo, 30, led them on a chase through the Red Bird area that ended in the mall parking lot. There,…

Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston is not happy with the Observer right now. “My issue is you reported one side and you didn’t get the other side,” he told us this morning. One side, the side we did get, was staked out by Dallas Police Chief David Brown when…

Police say that Benjamin Kevin Newman was drunk when he left The Hangout Patio Bar in Plano on Thursday night. The 22-year-old Dallas resident also must have been angry, since he allegedly steered his car into four people standing in the parking lot. “We believe, based on the evidence and…

U.S. Marshals on Friday arrested two suspects in the M Streets hit-and-run that killed 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez and critically injured his mother last week. Dagoberto Castanon, 25, and Rogelio Avila, 24 were discovered hiding in a Fort Myers, Florida, trailer park three days after they allegedly ran a stop sign…

Dallas Police Chief David Brown is once again denying accusations that DPD has watered down recruit training standards. The allegations were leveled recently by Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston, who said a recruit was allowed to retake and ultimately pass the police academy driving test despite multiple failures. A…

Dallas police think they have a lead in the death of 13-year-old Ethan Vasquez. At a press conference this morning, Deputy Chief Gil Garza Dagoberto identified 24-year-old Dagoberto Castanon, a convicted car thief, as a “person of interest” in the Tuesday morning M Streets car crash that killed Vasquez. Vasquez…

When the Frisco Police Department discovered the body of 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan in his Frisco home, they said, he was lying in a dry bathtub with a cloth wrapped around him, surrounded by plastic bags. His mother, Pallavi Dhawan, had arranged him that way, and police claimed in a press…

Sandy Vasquez and her 13-year old son, Ethan, were driving west through the M Streets Tuesday morning, apparently en route to school at William B. Travis Academy, when a stolen minivan ran a stop sign and broadsided their Nissan Versa. The car, as the photos show was demolished. Vasquez was…

With sex crimes, particularly those relating to children, the fair administration of justice sometimes takes a backseat to the urge to punish. Just glancing at the headline of the Tarrant County district attorney’s announcement of a 70-year prison sentence for failing to register as a sex offender might suggest 69-year-old…

Rodrick Tippett got off relatively easy for the pair of burglaries he committed in 2009. After six months behind bars, the judge changed what had been a six-year penitentiary sentence to six years of probation. The fact that one of his victims had been his sister does not appear to…