Shortly after a Dallas Police Department officer shot an unarmed teen last summer, there was a fairly simple explanation. The officers “responded to a burglary in progress,” police said. They found 19-year-old Gerardo Pinedo Jr. inside the house and ordered him to come outside and lie on the ground. He…
The 6900 block of Hemlock Avenue would have been dark at 9:30 Tuesday night. There are no street lights, just whatever light spills over from the adjacent apartment buildings. It would have been hard to see a couple of kids playing in the grass on the side of the road,…
Leroy Nelson, it’s fair to assume, has never owned a “remote aircraft landing marker.” Or a “seismographic probe.” Or a “chemical pipeline examiner,” which sounds like it would be a person but actually appears to be a made-up piece of equipment. Nelson, though, is not the type to let bourgeois…
Two years ago, no one had a clue what Erika Perdue had on her computer. Not her intellectual-property lawyer husband. Not her University Park neighbors. Her neon green Camaro with the “My Syn” license plates certainly raised some eyebrows, but no one suspected she was into child porn. Then, in…
Dallas’ St. Patrick’s Day parade and party on Greenville Avenue this weekend was, for all the drinking and debauchery, generally peaceful. According to the final tally Dallas PD sent out on Saturday evening, police arrested seven people for public intoxication and one for DWI, handed out 125 parking tickets, and…
Members of the Tri Delta sorority never technically own the diamond-studded star-and-crescent pins they are given upon initiation. They are merely caretakers, required to return the badges to the national organization upon their death, unless the executive board grants a special exception. That explains how Delta Delta Delta’s Arlington headquarters…
It took more than a year and two special sessions to do it, but last July, the Texas legislature finally provided a constitutional option for punishing teen murderers. In Texas, 17-year-olds are treated as adults for purposes of criminal law, which previously meant that those convicted of capital murder were…
An abusive counselor turned a camper’s idyllic summer at camp into a nightmare.
The underground sex economy in Dallas, you probably won’t be surprised to know, is thriving. Not thriving quite like the local trade in drugs ($191 million per year) or guns ($171 million), but it’s substantial, pulling in an estimated $98.9 million per year. That’s at least the figure reached in…
That moment when you spot the red-and-blue flashers in your rear-view mirror, emerging from behind a conveniently large shrub, is not a pretty one. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could avoid it, and do so without the bother of having to obey all traffic laws all the time? The…
The undeveloped stretch of woods north of Garland’s Firewheel Mall is exactly the type of spot where a Hollywood screenwriter would have the two panicked 16-year-old suburban kids, suddenly in way over their heads, dump their classmate’s body. It’s also, according to police, the type of spot where two panicked…
In October, the Duncanville Police Department responded to what they vaguely described as a “major disturbance.” After they arrived, a 28-year-old man named Clinton Peterson somehow ended up getting shot to death. The police department admitted this much in a press release published shortly after the shooting. But cops provided…
The last time Emily Lambert was seen alive was around 11:30 Saturday night, and she was leaving the motel bar at the Best Western in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Lambert, a third-grade teacher at Richardson ISD’s O’Henry Elementary, had traveled to New Mexico to spend the weekend her boyfriend. According to…
On the evening of July 13, 2010, a 36-year-old woman checked into the emergency room of Lake Pointe Medical Center in Rowlett. She was suffering from a painful infection on her left leg, the result of untreated poison ivy, but that was relatively low on her list of concerns. As…
It’s impossible to overstate the heinousness of the crimes Eric Lyle Williams is accused of. Prosecutors say the 45-year-old carried out a cold-blooded hit on Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse as he walked through a courthouse parking lot one morning last January. Two months later, on the day…
There’s a reason it’s illegal to fire a gun in city limits (Class A misdemeanor, punishable by a year in jail and a $4,000 fine). There’s no telling whose head those celebratory New Year’s rounds might fall upon, or which kitchen window might be breached during backyard target practice. On…
At midday on Wednesday, Dallas police and firefighters broke down the front door of a small townhome in the 1800 block of Browder Street in the Cedars to perform a welfare check. Inside, they found the bodies of Nick and Vanessa Pitofsky, both dead of gunshot wounds. Police are describing…
If The Dallas Morning News’ brief account of the Monday morning robbery of Hometown Day Spa left you a bit confused, you’re forgiven. Two armed men walk in and credibly pass themselves off as customers for several minutes as they plot their heist? The answer, as always, can be found…
It’s not easy to call the cops on your boyfriend when he’s a powerful judge, but in the beginning, it seemed that the law was on Maggie Strother’s side. Dallas Police Department officers visited the Uptown condo of state District Judge Carlos Cortez on December 28. There, Strother showed them…
Rewind for a moment to the morning of April 15, 2013. Tyrone Allen, 26, allegedly murders his pregnant girlfriend in Hamilton Park, then leads police on a wild 40-minute chase that ends about a block from where it began. He’s finally pulled from beneath a house and arrested after a…
William Ian Brown did not have a prescription for the single alprazolam (Xanax) pill he was allegedly carrying in his pocket when he was arrested on Sunday. A crime, to be sure, but a minor one. If prosecutors decided to pursue the case — given that it was a single…
It’s a curious phenomenon, the “death row groupies” who become enamored with men who committed some of the most vile crimes you can imagine. When Scott Peterson arrived at California’s San Quentin State Prison fresh off a conviction of murdering his wife and unborn child, he received a marriage proposal…
