Evidence has been mounting for years that Tasers are more dangerous than their manufacturer and law enforcement officials, who tout the weapon as a nonlethal alternative to firearms, have claimed.Over the past dozen years, 540 people, most of them unarmed, have died after being tased by police, according to a…
Dallas police Sergeant Carlton Barnes knew the man the bulletin described. They had gone to school together years before. Now, in September 2011, his friend was a capital murder suspect. According to an internal affairs investigation, Barnes ran the memo by a fellow officer, another former classmate, who confirmed that…
Bobby Gazdzicki’s plan worked brilliantly for three months. According to federal court documents, he discovered in April 2011 that as long as he could get hold of a legit tracking number, he could call FedEx, pose as a Dell employee and have the shipping company reroute brand-new computers to whatever…
Ricky Davis had known the girl since she was a baby. He wasn’t quite her uncle, but he might as well have been. His brother fathered four of her siblings, and Davis was close with the family. On August 19, 2012, Davis and the girl’s family went to church together…
Consider this a public service announcement for smokers of K-2 and similar products. There’s a widely available, all-natural product — a miracle, really — that delivers that synthetic marijuana-like high you crave without any unfortunate face-eating side effects. It’s called weed, and it’s about as easy to find as a…
A Dallas teenager is locked up this morning, accused of killing two people over drugs and money — and investigators have his mom to thank. Nineteen-year-old Jasper Okeith Adams Jr. was arrested by Dallas police on Tuesday for an outstanding warrant and quickly tied to a pair of murders. The…
William Skyler Leak’s tenure as the caretaker of a small Fort Worth stable was brief. Last August, after a short time on the job, he was fired and ordered to clear out of the on-site mobile home he’d been allowed to live in. “The owner didn’t like his work performance,”…
At this point, no one is quite sure what made 34-year-old Aaron Alexis walk into the Washington D.C. Navy Yard on Monday and allegedly open fire, killing 13 people. Yesterday afternoon, the FBI put out a call “for any information regarding Alexis.” “No piece of information is too small,” Valerie…
The suspected gunman in the Washington Navy Yard shootings is Aaron Alexis, a 34-year-old Fort Worth native who once lived in Forth Worth, NBC News is reporting. He was killed today, although there’s no word yet on how. NBC reports that he was able to infiltrate the Navy Yard by…
Saturday was a banner night for carjackings in Dallas. The one in which the thief drove off with a 14-year-old girl sleeping in the backseat got the most attention, but there were several. At 1 a.m., a man was attacked by a group of men who took his Cadillac Escalade,…
Just in time for next week’s London Design Festival, the Victoria and Albert Museum — the world’s largest repository of post-classical sculpture and East Asian and Islamic ceramics — will feature the work of a Texan that just might stand out: University of Texas law student Cody Wilson’s printable gun…
The stakes were high for Saturday night’s fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Mayweather was out to defend his crown as this generation’s most dominant fighter. Canelo, hugely popular in his native Mexico, was out to prove his skill by dethroning a world champ. Then, of course,…
The Texas Worm Ranch, a fixture at local farmer’s markets and producer of the Observer’s reigning Best Worm Doo-Doo Pee-Pee, is in crisis. Yesterday, they declared a “worm emergency” after its five commercial air conditioning units were stripped of their copper wiring, rendering them inoperable. When The Dallas Morning News…
When he drove through the Shadow Brook Apartments on Ferguson Road at 10:30 Thursday night, he dismissed Edward Jackson as just another bumbling rent-a-cop hiding behind a faux badge and uniform. That was his second mistake. His first was playing his music too loud on Jackson’s turf. His third, according…
A beer delivery truck idles in a convenience store parking lot, a couple of cases stacked on the pavement while the driver momentarily disappears inside. The cool, refrigerated air wafting from the open beckons you closer. A fleeting voice tugging at the edge of your mind whispers about how easy…
The first attack began as a robbery, turned into a carjacking, and ended in sexual assault and arson. Police say that Van Dralan Dixson approached a man as he stepped behind a South Dallas building to take a leak at about 4:45 on the morning of June 22. After the…
Last January, an FBI agent based in Maryland was cruising through a peer-to-peer file-sharing network in search of child porn. There, he stumbled upon a user named “Classybitch,” who offered him access to several hundred videos and images with file names like “Taboo Incest – Grampa Fucks Sleeping Girl Pedo…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer accused of a string of rapes in South Dallas, was arrested in Baton Rouge on Tuesday, several local news outlets are reporting. Police announced Dixson as a suspect over the weekend after DNA evidence linked him to one of the assaults. Subsequent DNA…
It’s 3 a.m. You’re driving around Pleasant Grove, hot-boxing your car, when the cops pull you over for a minor traffic violation. Smoke billows from the window as the officer approaches. The smell of marijuana is unmistakable. What do you do? NORML, the national pot-advocacy group, has a handy primer…
Van Dralan Dixson, the neighborhood watch volunteer now tied by DNA to four South Dallas rapes, is out of jail and on the run. Alan Mason, the silver Honda-driving, oval glasses-wearing man whom police publicly identified as a “person of interest” before the results of the DNA test came in,…
Two years ago, David Mangum left Dallas, where he’d lived for a decade or more, and moved to Dexter, Missouri, population 8,000, where he got a job in a grocery store. He kept the reasons for the move mostly to himself. Small-town life would seem ill-suited to his favorite pastime…
Dallas police haven’t officially cleared Alan Mason, the man they identified as a “person of interest” in the recent string of nine rapes in the area around Fair Park, of wrongdoing. He’s still in jail for violating his probation for driving while intoxicated. But any evidence suggesting his involvement –…
