A year ago, John Pena Medellin, aka “Papa John,” aka “Uncle John,” the founding president of the Los Homeboys motorcycle club, was head of an operation that purchased large quantities of black-tar heroin, meth, and coke (some of it from Dallas’ Enchanted Hills apartments, and distributed it throughout the DFW…
Update at 11:47 a.m.: The AP has a few more details. Travis apparently knew the woman who was arguing with her estranged husband. No one was injured, but Travis and another woman were both ticketed for simple assault, a Class C misdemeanor. The police report does not indicate that alcohol…
Things were going well for Charles Anthony Jones last Valentine’s Day. Business was good, he had $3,000 cash in his front pocket and enough anti-impotence medication in his car to kill a stallion. But that’s when things started going down hill. Irving police arrested him later that day and took…
In 2010, Theadora Ross was a senior corporal with the Dallas Police Department and the officer in charge of Dallas Crime Stoppers, the program that offers thousands in cash rewards to tipsters who give information leading to arrest and indictment of criminals. Now, she is neither of those things. Last…
On Sunday morning, with their knocks and phone calls unanswered and water pouring from beneath locked doors, family members broke into Deanna Cook’s home. They found the 32-year-old dead in her bath tub. Two days before, police had been called to a domestic disturbance at the home. Dallas police knocked…
On the night of July 7, two women huddled in the back bedroom of the mobile home at 6108 Big Wood Court in rural Tarrant County. From another room, they could hear the cries of 34-year-old Earnest Ray Lackey, as three men hog-tied and beat him for hours until, at…
Five days after Yayehyirad Lemma and Yenenesh Desta dead on the front porch of their Marquita Street home, police have captured the suspected killer. Abey Bilette Girma, 37, fled to Colorado after allegedly following Lemma and Desta home early Wednesday morning and shooting them to death. According to an arrest…
For a time, Johar Saran was at the head of one of the largest prescription drug rings in the country. He claimed to own 22 pharmacies in the Dallas area, under cover of which he ordered tremendous quantities of in-demand prescription drugs (codeine cough syrup, for one) then used the…
A capital murder warrant has been issued for Abey Bilette Girma, 37, in the killing of the owners of Desta, an Ethiopian restaurant, at around midnight on Aug. 15. Yayehyirad Lemma and Yenenesh Desta were gunned down on the front porch of their home on Marquita Street after closing the…
Just after 8 o’clock this morning, I was riding to work, as I always do, along the Sante Fe Trail. I’d just passed Woodrow and was riding along the fields at Randall Park when I heard pop, pop on my left. It sounded like when a squirrel drops a half-eaten…
Google “Oak Farms reward” and you’ll get a lot of hits, recent news articles mostly with headlines like “Oak Farms offers $10,000 reward in murder of Arlington couple,” “Reward offered in hairdresser’s murder,” “Oak Farms Dairy offers reward in DART retiree murder.” Most recently, it was $10,000 for the arrest…
First, a word of caution. If someone cold-calls you, says they’re a police officer, then asks you to withdraw a large some of cash from the bank so they can see if it’s counterfeit, don’t do it. Chances are, they’re not actually a cop and you’re never going to find…
Update at 11:45 a.m.: Never mind. Police just retracted the $10,000 reward. “Detectives are working on potential information,” they said via news release, which I assume means they have a possible lead. Original post: Police still don’t know who shot 40-year-old Yayehyirad Lemma and 31-year-old Yenenesh Desta on the front…
Bad things began to happen to Terrence Hill around this time last year. His troubles began when he went to move into a new apartment but was instead given a totally different unit, one with broken air conditioning. His bad week, he says, escalated from there. By 7:30 a.m. on…
Last month, Texas’ prison population was right at 154,000, the lowest its been in five years. Lower crime rates, an aging population, and alternative treatments have all contributed to the decline. But as the Star-Telegram noted yesterday, the drop hasn’t been enough to spare Texas the dubious distinction of locking…
Amidst a cluster of Ethiopian businesses near Greenville Avenue and 635 sits Desta, “one of a few restaurants in Dallas with the patience” to make their own injera, the classic Ethiopian spongy bread, as our food critic wrote last year. It’s a process that takes a lot of work, so…
Media outlets in Chicago are reporting this morning that Brianna Gardner, a 22-year-old from Dallas, was fatally shot in the head in an upscale Chicago hotel. Gardner’s body was discovered in her seventh-floor room by the Whitehall Hotel housekeeping staff. One guest told the Chicago Tribune they heard a gunshot…
On paper, Allen Chiu seemed to be a very big Nordstrom fan. Over the course of 22 months starting in January 2010, the Dallasite and his brother Andrew of California ordered more than $23 million of merchandise through the upscale department store’s website. That won’t go as far at Nordstrom…
On the Dallas Police Department’s Facebook page this afternoon, Chief David Brown announced in a lengthy post measures to “positively impact officer safety and improve public trust and confidence.” The announcement comes in the wake of the July 24 shooting death of James Harper and a spate of other officer-involved…
At the corner of Corinth Street and Park Avenue, in a neighborhood of rundown homes and produce houses a stone’s throw from Heritage Village, is the old bakery Herschel Weisfeld bought 15 years ago to convert into a live-work space for artists. The apartment units are in the back and…
It wasn’t long ago that we found country singer Randy Travis drinking wine in front of the First Baptist Church in Sanger. But the man has topped himself. Pretty much everyone is now reporting that Travis walked naked into a Grayson County convenience store to buy cigarettes last night, crashed…
Lennie Small was the simple-minded field worker in Of Mice and Men who, in a moment of confused panic, inadvertently kills the wife of the boss’ son. He’s an iconic character in American literature, so iconic that Texas used him as a benchmark to help decide when it’s okay to…
