There’s not a lot of what Michael Pollan would call “food” at South Dallas’ KSO Dollar Mart. Plenty of beer, wine and hair care products, according to the signs out front, but not much by way of whole grains or fresh produce. The store nevertheless did a thriving business in…
Robert Hamilton, 72, was walking down the 2900 block of Jeffries Street in South Dallas at 4 p.m. on Thursday when he was approached by a group of five boys. ‘Hey old man,” they called to him, according to a police report. “You got some money?” Hamilton did have money,…
When he gets out of federal lockup, Michael Allen Watson may want to consider finding a new line of work. His current vocation — counterfeiting money using computer printers — isn’t working out so well. Six years ago, the U.S. Secret Service raided Watson’s Dallas home after a pit bull…
Ronnie’s Catfish & More is delicious. How delicious? This delicious: According to Dallas police, a man walked into the Ronnie’s location on Red Bird Lane at 7:45 p.m. Tuesday. “What can I get for six bucks?” he asked. He ordered a two-piece catfish basket ($4.69 plus tax, includes fries, pickles,…
Generally speaking, the Dallas Police Department does Twitter pretty well. Helmed by a chief who uses it to live-tweet disciplinary hearings and set up lunch dates with reporters at Chili’s, and who isn’t afraid to drop a “cocksucker” every now and then, DPD’s output is timely and detailed enough to…
A week ago, the Frisco Police Department was convinced that it had a solid case against Pallavi Dhawan in the mysterious death of her 10-year-old son, Arnav, and was ready to tell everyone about it. “Officers asked if she had killed the child and Mrs. Dhawan nodded her head ‘yes,'”…
Frisco has some sort of ordinance that prosecutes humans who hold signs. The police know this, because they used that ordinance as an excuse to bust the man who waved a “Police Ahead” sign at passing motorists. As we told you last month, Ron Martin was arrested by the very…
Ethan Couch, the 16-year-old from Keller who drunkenly ran over four pedestrians, then got probation after pleading affluenza, was back in court yesterday to learn the conditions of his sentence. Reporters were barred from the courtroom by District Judge Jean Boyd, who, according to the Tarrant County DA’s office, ordered…
Michael McDowell could have quit while he was ahead. During more than a decade spent posing as a military officer, he’d won heartfelt acclaim from military brass like CIA director David Petraeus, gotten behind-the-scenes access to the Washington Navy Yard, convinced the state of Texas to give him special Purple…
Dallas has never been able to clear the homeless from downtown streets, though not for lack of trying. Bans on panhandling, feeding homeless people, library benches and sleeping in public have provided city officials with helpful tools, but they have proved inadequate. Or perhaps it’s just that because they weren’t…
At first blush, the death last week of Frisco 10-year-old Arnav Dhawan seemed like another one of those too-gruesome-to-contemplate, too-compelling-to-turn-away stories of child abuse that flash across the local headlines with disturbing regularity. According to police, the boy’s mother, 38-year-old Pallavi Dhawan, confessed to murdering her son while her husband…
There are some obvious parallels between Ethan Couch and Josh Brent. Both got drunk and caused fatal car wrecks. Both had the means to hire talented private attorneys. Both were given offensively light sentences that sparked outrage. To most observers, that’s where the similarities end. Couch is white, Brent black…
There’s no doubt that rookie Fort Worth cop Alex Hoeppner screwed up spectacularly on the morning of May 28. He and his partner, also a rookie, responded to the wrong house for a burglary call. When he encountered a man with a gun near the garage he opened fire, discovering…
At first, Mineral Wells police were stumped by Shannon Herrin Huddleston’s death. How could a grown woman, her home and person bearing no sign that she’d been attack, wind up locked in her own freezer? Things became clearer when the autopsy report came back in October and speculated that Huddleston…
Some might argue that Gary Lee Young was performing a public service as he hung around the parking lot of the Dallas International Street Church on South 2nd Avenue earlier this month. The Lord’s work, if you will. Not long after midnight on January 9, Young watched a would-be john…
Pro tip: When planning a bank heist, it’s best to eliminate or conceal any distinguishing features that might help cops identify you later. Exhibit A is this Fort Worth bank robber’s grotesque salt-and-pepper facial hair. Yes, the powder blue sweats are suitably nondescript, and the beanie-over-the-eyes trick is a nice…
A Dallas police officer was arrested today for allegedly raping a woman he’d pulled over. According to a DPD news release, officer La’cori Johnson stopped a vehicle on the 9300 block of Larga Drive on September 9, 2013. Johnson told the woman driving the car that she had an outstanding…
For a portrait of the Kafkaesque nightmare criminal residency restrictions can create, go read about the permanent sex offender camp that took root several years ago beneath Miami’s Julia Tuttle Causeway. Thanks to a local ordinance barring them from living within 2,500 feet of any place that children congregate, there…
For the past year Redflex Traffic Systems, Inc., one of the two big players in the red-light camera industry, has been embroiled in a bribery scandal in Chicago. The company, according to news reports, treated a senior transportation official to lavish vacations and had an unusually close relationship with bureaucrats…
With the knockout game having officially arrived in Dallas, and with the two documented cases here occurring in restaurant parking lots in northern Dallas, it would be only natural to assume that the man beaten with a baseball bat outside Smashburger on McKinney Avenue is a victim. Yet that doesn’t…
The circumstantial evidence against Charles Stobaugh is damning. His estranged wife, Kathy, was last seen on the night of December 29, 2004, setting out for his isolated farmhouse to discuss their divorce, set to be finalized the next day. Add in his domineering personality and his evident heartburn at the…
For 15 months, Sidelines Private Sports Lounge provided what it billed as “South Side’s Version of Upscale,” which included drinks, dancing, Madden tournaments and exotic dancers performing on the establishment’s prominent stripper pole. The problem, according to Dallas police, is that it was operating illegally, and it was doing just…
