Around 1:45 Tuesday morning, Lee Dell Thomas, Jr. climbed out of the vomit-soaked cabin of a crane high above SMU, dangled from the outside of the crane by two arms, then one, and then plummeted 150 feet to his death. It was a clumsy death, undignified, and quiet. Most of…
Update at 12:52 p.m.:Police have identified the man as 44-year-old Lee Dell Thomas, Jr. A news conference is scheduled for 4 p.m. at DPD headquarters. Update at 11:46 a.m.:The Dallas Police Department has posted an update of sorts on its Facebook page. They still have not identified the man and…
When I picked up the phone a bit ago, I was expecting a call back from a congressional candidate for whom I’d left a message. Instead, it was a robocall from a pleasant-voiced woman speaking Spanish. I would have hung up — I’ve forgotten what little I learned in high…
The body was identified only by the man’s
tattoos
Recent anthrax scares at preschools, synagogues, government offices, and just about anywhere else the U.S. Postal Service will deliver a white powder-filled envelope, not to mention the panting media coverage, has people on edge, calling in the cavalry at the sight of powdered sugar. Or blow. Dallas Fire Rescue’s Haz-Mat…
Every week writers for Dallas Observer and our parent company, Village Voice Media, produce elegant magazine-style feature writing — a gritty portion of which comes in the form of true-crime stories. Now VVM has collected some of its best recent true-crime yarns into an ebook: Seven Sins: A True Crime…
Darius Ewing, the 18-year-old black man who surrendered to Dallas Police after the death of the stray lab-terrier puppy Justice, saw his bail dropped from $100,000 to $50,000 at a hearing last week. Justice died on April 13, a little more than a week after the puppy was unsuccessfully hanged…
As most people who follow the news know by now, since Craig Watkins became Dallas County district attorney in 2007, 33 local men have been exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit. But what does this number mean in the context of the rest of the nation, and what are the…
Word came early Saturday afternoon that the Dallas Police Department had identified veteran shit disturber Dominique Trevun Thornton as one of the suspects in a string of armed robberies along the Katy Trail. And it wasn’t 24 hours later before they announced that 23-year-old Thornton was in custody — reportedly…
On Friday, Dallas police reported that they were investigating the apparent overdose deaths of two students from Thomas Jefferson High School in March and April: 14-year-old Jaime Morales, who was found dead at his home in Northwest Dallas, and an unnamed 17-year-old, found dead in an apartment on Ferguson Road…
“Cheese,” the cheap-as-hell mixture of cold medicine and black tar heroin, is again rearing its head at DISD’s Thomas Jefferson High School. The school, which was known by students as the Cheesehead Factory, had reportedly done a pretty good job of ridding if from their hallways.Now, another student has died…
Michelle Flores finished her bartending shift at a Dallas nightclub and was driving home to Fort Worth late Sunday night when someone pulled alongside her car, mouthing ‘Your tire, your tire … pull over.’ The 35-year-old mother of three would have normally ignored such a warning, but this time pulled…
An exhaustive new study has found alarming conditions for Texas teenagers housed in adult jails while awaiting trial, a practice that Dallas and Harris counties use more than anywhere else in the state. In essence, the study found that there’s really no good way to keep teens and adults safely…
Update at 4:55 p.m.Turns out, the powder was harmless. Tests, presumably by someone who has crushed anti-depressants into powder, showed that the substance was similar to “an anti-depressant medication that had been crushed into a powder.” In the case at the Arbors shopping center in far North Dallas, a clerk…
It’s always unsettling when envelopes containing white powder start showing up in mailboxes, because even though it’s probably baking soda, it could always be good ol’ anthrax. The 20-plus powder-filled letters that showed up at schools, childhood development centers and aerospace-related businesses last week were apparently harmless, but the FBI…
The Dallas Police Department is continuing to explain away — and maybe overcompensate for — their initial silence concerning the armed robberies on the Katy Trail and the dozen-or-so incidents police believe they’re linked to.A pair of press releases from police hit the inbox yesterday evening, one an unusually discursive…
Police rolled into the roundabout encircling Kelly Gordon Rogers’ fountain at his sprawling estate in Frisco recently, with warrants charging him with money laundering, securities fraud and aggravated theft in a $2.8 million oil and gas rip-off. The indictments, issued by a Collin County grand jury, provide a laundry list…
We know a lot more about the string of recent armed robberies at the Katy Trail since the Dallas Police Department initially released some details on the incidents yesterday. We know, for example, that police think all were committed by a pair of black men in their 20s who were…
Question: Is Jim Schutze a prophet, or does does the city just go to him for its marching orders? Just a few short hours ago, he was grousing about the piddling response by the Dallas Police Department to a string of armed robberies on the Katy Trail.Immediately DPD officers, who…
This week’s feature tells the story of Debbie Jones, a Richardson woman who was raped and robbed at knifepoint in 1985, when she was 19. Soon after the crime, Jones picked Thomas McGowan out of a photo lineup. He was convicted of burglary and sexual assault and sentenced to two…
The badly burned body of a man in his 20s or 30s was found Saturday in a vacant field at the end of Wixom Lane in far southeast Dallas, not far from a set of railroad tracks. His death is being treated as a homicide, but police haven’t yet identified…
Around 3 a.m. today, a cab driver called the Dallas police to report that he’d been carjacked after dropping off a passenger. He couldn’t specify just where he’d been when this happened, and he didn’t know the license plate number of the cab, only the unit number. Upon arriving at…
