Death row inmate Michael Yowell’s last-minute, Hail Mary lawsuit, based on the claim that the state was going to experiment on him with untested execution drugs, failed to sway U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. In an order handed down Saturday, he dismissed that as “a guess piled on an assumption”…
It’s always a thankless task, manning the counter at a convenience store, but it was particularly unpleasant for those who happened to be working the graveyard shift at southern Dallas 7-Elevens last night. In the span of just over an hour and a half, four of the stores were robbed…
Richard Slatkin must have appreciated the irony in his predicament. Here he was, a 66-year-old private investigator who caught cheating spouses for a living — whose stock and trade was sorting through lies to find something near the truth — and he was being divorced by a wife who had…
Earlier in the week, 59-year-old Robert Prichard learned he would be staying in jail for the time being. A Dallas County judge upped his bail to $50,000 on a felony animal cruelty charge and sent him back to Lew Sterrett. The upside for Prichard is that he now has more…
John Boehr, a 31-year-old opera singer from Carrollton, says he was violently mugged Thursday afternoon as he walked to choir practice in South Dallas. The attack happened at 3:10 p.m., as Boehr was en route to the Dallas Opera’s rehearsal facility at 4301 S. Fitzhugh, on the far eastern edge…
UPDATE: After this item ran, we sent a question to Texas Department of Criminal Justice public information director Jason Clark, asking him — not to put too fine a point on it — why Texas doesn’t just switch to an alternative method of execution altogether, like the electric chair. The…
When it was first announced, all the way back in January, the Frisco Gun Club billed itself as the nation’s largest indoor shooting range. Nine months later, as club prepares to open this month, it has dropped that claim, focusing instead on its luxurious VIP lounge and culinary offerings. There’s…
Now that the war in Iraq is officially over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Defense found itself facing a conundrum. It had just spent billions of dollars buying heavily armored personnel carriers designed to stand up to insurgent attacks only to find that it had…
Update at 1:11 p.m.: Police have identified the homeowner as 57-year-old William Hall. According to county property records, he lives at 10316 Sandra Lynn Drive, which shares an alley with Plummer Drive. At a press conference this morning, police provided a more detailed narrative of the shooting, which you can…
It’s a question that stumps even the most erudite of moral philosophers: who beats their own grandmother? What type of vile creature would stoop so low as to willingly injure a blood relative, much less one who’s frail and 85 years old? Here, at last, is the answer: James Dolan…
The Founding Fathers were farsighted men. They were wise enough to write iron-clad protections of individual liberty into the Bill of Rights and wise enough to craft those protections with just enough wiggle room that, three centuries on, they would still be relevant. Take the Second Amendment: A well regulated…
The goal of the U.N.’s Arms Trade Treaty — of fostering international peace and cooperation and “reducing human suffering” — is laudable. Its methods, which basically consist of asking countries to monitor gun exports so they don’t wind up in the hands of terrorists and other malevolent actors, are commonsense…
There are a handful of possible explanations for what went down on Tuesday night at the McDonald’s at 4800 South Freeway in Fort Worth. It may have been, as Sergeant Joe Loughman suggested to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, an act of divine intervention. Perhaps gun manufacturers developed a mind-reading anti-murder…
Liberty Tax Service doesn’t let just anyone don its trademark Lady Liberty costume and dance for potential tax customers. There are tryouts and specialized training on proper singing, dancing and waving techniques. A lot of dreams are crushed. Channing Gould was one of the lucky ones. A 19-year-old performing arts…
Kiowa Park, a postage stamp of green space tucked behind Prestonwood Elementary in Far North Dallas, is not known as hotbed of Voodoo or Santeria, a fact that makes yesterday’s discovery all the more puzzling. According to police, a neighborhood resident was walking a dog through the park at about…
Van Dralan Dixson, the man accused of raping as many as nine women in South Dallas in recent months, is sorry. He’s sorry that he raped a woman as she walked home from her job at at a fast-food chicken restaurant on September 1, then stole her cell phone, cash,…
Every man has his limit, and Leonard Small reached his late Sunday night, somewhere between the apartment parking lot where he was picked up for public intoxication and the Dallas city jail. When officers ushered the 25-year-old out from the back of the paddy wagon, they noticed that his pants…
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…
