After 2.5 hours of deliberations Monday morning, a Tarrant County jury convicted Charles Bryant in the murder of 24-year-old Jacqueline Vandagriff in September 2016. Bryant, 30, killed Vandagriff before dismembering her and burning her remains in a kiddie pool he left at Acorn Woods Park near Lake Grapevine. Bryant and Vandagriff met…
The victim of pit bull mauling near Fair Park early Sunday morning remains hospitalized in stable condition, according to the Dallas Police Department. About 2 a.m. Sunday, four pit bulls cornered a woman, whom DPD hasn’t identified, as she walked through her neighborhood in the 4300 block of Hamilton Avenue,…
Three years after a man in an armored van launched a sustained attack on the Dallas Police Department’s headquarters in the Cedars, long-awaited increases in police station security are almost complete, according to new information from the city of Dallas. Improvements to the interiors of most of the department’s substations…
Sometime after 8:30 a.m. Monday, Ethan Couch is getting out of Tarrant County jail. The 20-year-old drunken-driving killer responsible for the portmanteau “affluenza” becoming part of the American lexicon will have served 720 days, completing a condition set by District Judge Wayne Salvant for Couch’s transfer to the adult probation…
An 18-year-old man arrested Thursday for a deadly shooting at a Plano apartment complex is also a suspect in two murders committed in Arlington on Thursday morning, Arlington police said Friday. Plano police believe Franklin Lee Barnes shot four people, killing one, at the Cross Creek Apartments on Alma Drive…
Charles “Big Charlie” Flores and Richard Childs were searching for money when they slid under the garage door of a one-story brick home on Bergen Street. The Black family had built it in the early 1960s when the one-block neighborhood of Farmers Branch was nothing but pasture. They had raised…
Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz found himself, as he has so often, near the center of the political universe. Not for a good reason, either. In a series of reports released by The New York Times and The Guardian, Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company bankrolled by Republican mega-donor Robert Mercer,…
A Denton County sheriff’s patrol sergeant posted a Craigslist advertisement looking for a “needy twink” who wanted to have sex, according to investigators who arrested the officer on charges of solicitation of a minor. “I’m near UNT,” 46-year-old Weston Jordan wrote in an ad posted Tuesday. “I will host and…
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban denied doing anything wrong Tuesday, following the publication of sexual assault allegations made against Cuban in 2011 in Willamette Week, a Portland alt-weekly. According to Portland Police Department documents obtained by Willamette Week, a woman ran into Cuban while out on the town with her…
Fernando Cabrera needed someone with a car to take him to pick up some money that a friend known as “Pancho” in Mexico had asked the 21-year-old South Texan to collect. Cabrera, in turn, asked another friend, who asked a younger buddy whose mother wouldn’t let him use the car…
The gunshots erupted shortly after 2 a.m. Feb. 19. Dallas postal employee Tony Mosby, 58, had just left the Dallas Main Post Office in a United States Postal Service 11-ton box truck when a car loaded with four friends tried to pass him on the highway. The four had just…
There he is. Standing on a huge rock. Sitting on top of the world. “I just wanna say that yes, in fact, I do know how lucky I am,” says Wally Lynn, arms and heart wide open as he and his cup of Jack Daniel’s welcome a couple hundred guests…
Seizing on a teachable moment and the chance for a little publicity, Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree said Tuesday that his deputies are expected to take immediate action, rather than wait for backup, if they encounter an active shooter. Murphree’s directive comes 13 days after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz allegedly shot and…
It’s easy to forget, as much of a pro sports town as Dallas has become, that the city’s professional sports history is a comparatively short one. After a couple of false starts by both the NFL and AFL versions of the Dallas Texans, Dallas finally got its first permanent pro…
Two things — something that happened in my neighborhood last week and the school slaughter in Parkland, Florida — have conspired to reignite a line of thought plaguing me on and off over the last year or so. I’m thinking about the principle of community policing. I used to believe…
Dallas police Chief U. Renee Hall’s days as an out-of-uniform civilian administrator are over. The Dallas Police Department announced Thursday morning that Hall has passed her Texas Commission on Law Enforcement licensing exam, making her a real Texas police officer and allowing her to wear a DPD uniform. “TCOLE test done!…
I’ve got a serious case of what I believe the shrinks would call cognitive dissonance going on here, involving a conflict between local news and the news from the White House. First, the local: A suburban Dallas mother and father have been sentenced to federal prison — the mother for…
Former Texas Rangers starting pitcher Esteban Loaiza — best known for being the biggest piece in one of the best trades in franchise history — is in a San Diego County jail after being arrested on three drug felonies Friday. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s Border Crimes Suppression Team found…
For the second time in less than a month, a man hunted around a Walgreens parking lot on Ross Avenue, searching for an unlocked car. At about 2:30 p.m. Sunday, he found one and hopped in the back seat, just as a man had early in the morning of Jan…
A Dallas County grand jury declined Wednesday to indict any of the Dallas Police Department officers who helped kill the gunman who shot and killed six Dallas officers in a July 7, 2016, ambush, according to the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office. The decision closes the books on an investigation…
Starting next Monday in the Dallas Police Department’s South Central Patrol Division, a new kind of team will respond to mental health calls placed to 911. Instead of sending just police officers or paramedics, the city will dispatch a three-person team made up of a specially trained police officer, a…
Late Monday afternoon, the Observer received a statement from the Dallas Police Department about a “civil rights video” filmed over the weekend at the department’s southeast patrol division. It sounded very serious. “The Dallas Police Department is aware of the video filmed at the Southeast Division over the weekend and takes…
