Kelly Helleson will no doubt think twice before performing any roadside cavity searches on evidently law-abiding citizens. In January, the Texas Department of Public Safety fired the state trooper for her unusually thorough probe of two Irving women, a decision that severely limited her opportunities to conduct such searches. Now,…
For the third time in four days, Dallas police held a press conference about the string of rapes in Lake Highlands. Still no answer for who was responsible for three rapes over the past month, but the investigation has made progress, DPD Major Jeff Cotner told the press this afternoon…
The Arlington Police Department recently got permission from the FAA to use the two small, battery-operated drones they purchased last year using grant money from Homeland Security. Presumably, the drones will mostly be used to hover over Jerry Jones while he’s at work, clipping him in the head with a…
Early this morning, around 3:30 a.m., a 22-year-old SMU marketing student was returning to his apartment complex in the 5900 block of University Boulevard when, just inside the gate, he was approached by two women. They were both in their mid-20s, he said, had bleached blond hair, black shirts and…
The Mexican cartels, never ones to rest on their ingenuity, are always coming up with new and inventive ways to smuggle large quantities of drugs into the United States. Take the drug cannon, modeled on the T-shirt launching devices used at NBA games, or the brilliant drive-a-Jeep-over-a-border-fence gambit. Now, Wired…
Speaking to reporters yesterday afternoon, Dallas Police Chief David Brown expressed confidence that the department had already solved the first of a string of three Lake Highlands rapes. The suspect was Fernando Munoz, 33, who police believed had broken into a Ferndale Road home in the early hours of February…
A new bill introduced in the Texas Senate would allow counties to open their own holding centers for juvenile law-breakers. Teenage offenders are currently held in lockups operated by the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. Senate bill 511, authored by state Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat, would give counties the…
When a Lake Highlands woman was raped last month by an attacker who climbed through the window of her Ferndale Road home, it seemed like an aberration in a generally quiet and well-kept neighborhood. It seemed like somewhat less of a fluke when the same thing happened three weeks later…
Publicly shaming convicted sex offenders is nothing new. Relatively few people object to their names and photos being plastered on the Internet as a scarlet letter tattooed to their foreheads for all to see. There’s a plausible argument to be made that this helps promote public safety by alerting neighbors…
Dallas police didn’t set out to arrest Julio Escobar at the intersection of Oak Lawn and Hall Street at 5 a.m. this morning. They set out to arrest the 25-year-old at a Lemmon Avenue apartment complex a half mile away, where they took note of his slurred speech and alcohol…
The Dallas County District Attorney’s office has dismissed its case against John David Mahaffey, the SMU student arrested in September and accused of forcing another male student to perform oral sex. Prosecutors filed a motion to dismiss the case on March 14. The one-page request says, simply: “Upon review of…
This crowd during this weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day festivities was relatively well-behaved, as far as these things go. Sure, there were three dozen public intoxication arrests and one DWI, but by far the most common offense was a simple parking violation, of which police issued 243. Not a bad outcome,…
Christopher Jones was lurking behind a dumpster at a FedEx Kinkos at Skillman and LBJ around 2 this morning when, according to Dallas PD, a police cruiser pulled to a stop nearby. The officers inside, Kyle Tholl and Erik Vasquez, were on routine patrol when they spotted spotted two men…
In late 2008 and early 2009, the Five Points area was put on edge by the news that two girls there, one 12, the other 14, had been bound with tape and sexually assaulted by a suspected serial rapist. Detectives, after combing through police calls and incident reports, zeroed in…
On February 5, U.S. Postal Inspectors customs agents were doing a routine inspection at the North Texas Processing and Distribution Center when they spotted a package freshly arrived from Singapore and destined for a home address in Crowley. The customs agents opened the mail — they have the authority to…
As Washington shuffles forward toward some sort of expansion of gun control (universal background checks, yes; bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, maybe not), state legislators in Texas are debating the optimal technique for thumbing their noses at the federal government. On Wednesday, the House Select Committee on Federalism…
Late last month, 27-year-old Sondra Scarber and her girlfriend Hillary Causey headed to a Mesquite elementary school’s playground, to take Causey’s 4-year-old son Jaxon to play. The couple later told police that soon after they arrived, some much bigger boys started pushing Jaxon around. “Can you please keep your hands…
It’s hard to fathom why someone would murder a 79-year-old woman in the home she’s lived in for 50 years, and do so in such a brutal manner that police have declined to so much as hint at her injuries. But police might be a step closer to finding out…
There was a time when the Highland Hills Crips were a big enough catch that the Feds targeted them with “Operation Greedy Grove” and trumpeted the arrest of several members with a press release. Fast forward two-and-a-half years. It’s Sunday morning, 11 a.m. A youngish gentleman, who might ought to…
Tyrone and Patrick Weatherall had a number of bad habits. Besides the obvious one, their fondness for selling crack, the brothers had lavish, attention-getting taste, which is probably ill-advised when you’re in the drug-selling business. According to street lore, when the Weatheralls first united some Crips and Bloods to form…
There is, apparently, an entity known as the North Texas Counterproliferation Task Force. It’s sufficiently new/under the radar to yield exactly zero matches on Google, but it’s a thing, and it’s made up of agents from the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security, and the Departments of Commerce and…
Timothy Woodard and Elizabeth Weaver, 48 and 53, respectively, were at their home in the 3800 block of Davila Drive at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday when they answered a knock at the door. On the porch were two strangers, whom they invited inside. It’s not clear from police reports or a…
