Old Dude Whips Out a Concealed Handgun and Kills Chain-Snatcher Who Attacked His Wife

Categories: Crime

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Google
Ronnie Lummus, 71, must not look like the type to carry a gun.

But it's a good thing he was packing last night. He and his wife were shopping at Aldi's on Forest Lane in Northwest Dallas, close to LBJ Freeway. When the couple finished, they walked through the sliding glass doors to the parking lot around 7:20 p.m., and that's when Lummus' wife's gold necklace caught one man's eye.

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Dallas' Finest Orthopedist Says Tony Romo Can Play Sunday If He's Tough Enough

Categories: Healthcare, Sports

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The Loomis Agency via YouTube
Dr. Jerry specializes in pizza, rapping and back injuries.
Jerry Jones, who's served as the Dallas Cowboys' team physician since 1989, told KRLD 105.3 Wednesday morning that the team's quarterback, Tony Romo, will be medically able to play Sunday against the 6-1 Arizona Cardinals.

Romo, who had two back surgeries in 2013 -- one before the season to remove a cyst and one after the season to repair structural damage -- took a vicious Keenan Robinson knee to the back during the third quarter of the Cowboys' Monday night game with Washington.

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To Keep Guns Off Campus, School Cops Count on Students and Social Media

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Joe Mabel
Dallas ISD police have not seized any weapons so far this year. But how much of that is due to increasingly angelic students, and how much to kids failing to report when they see a peer with a weapon?

When it comes to reporting weapons in schools, kids are often each others' best watchdogs. In light of the recent Washington high school shooting, and the school shootings in recent years at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and Columbine, police departments across the country are constantly brainstorming new ways to decrease the likelihood of violent events occurring on school grounds.

Researchers at UT-Dallas compiled specific data concerning how, when and why students report seeing weapons in school. According to the study, 34 percent of students anonymously report seeing a weapon of some sort on campus sometime in the last three months.

"That number was higher than we expected," concedes Dr. Nadine Connell, one of the authors of the study. "But the flip side was on average over 90 percent reported being willing to tell someone about that. They're not ignoring it; they're not taking it on as their own responsibility."

In Dallas ISD, Police Chief Craig Miller says campus security depends on students coming forward when they see a potentially dangerous situation. "What would happen, and it's not unusual, is if social media or a friend told us someone had a weapon, we would discreetly confront or try to ascertain whether that was correct," he says.

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Craig Watkins' Office Sees Conspiracy Behind News' Request for Public Records

Categories: Media
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A judge asked the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and The Dallas Morning News to salvage their relationship Monday, but instead the two parties will duke it out in court.
A lawyer for the Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins says politics is behind a Dallas Morning News lawsuit seeking to force Watkins' office to comply with Texas' public records law and release documents about how the district attorney spends forfeiture funds.

"This is not about trying to get records," Russell Wilson, an assistant district attorney, told state District Judge Jim Jordan at a hearing Monday. The timing, Wilson said, was "suspicious" since the News filed its lawsuit on October 23, one week after its editorial board endorsed Republican Susan Hawk, who is running against Watkins in next week's election.

It's an interesting theory, and usually Unfair Park is willing to believe all sorts of dark motives lurk behind decisions at the Morning News, but it ignores the fact that News courthouse reporter Jennifer Emily filed her first request for records about Watkins' use of his office's civil forfeiture funds on September 4. She filed a second request for additional records on September 15. The News' lawyer sent his own letter asking about her request on October 1 and another on October 9. In the latter, he even warned the district attorney's office that the paper was ready to consider its legal options if Watkins' office didn't respond by October 13.

The News' suit says Watkins' office didn't respond at all to the September 4 request and only partly to the one filed September 15.

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DFW Airport Homophobe Caught on Video Is McCleish Christmas Benham from Tennessee

Categories: Crime

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DFW Airport DPS
Merry Christmas.
Earlier Tuesday, we told you that we didn't yet know the identity of the drunk, gay-slurring man who attempted to assault a man at DFW airport before being tackled by a group of good Samaritans. Now we do. His name is McCleish Christmas Benham and he lives in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

The police report included below outlines what happened before you see Benham get his butt kicked in the now-viral video. Benham began swearing at an airline employee while she attempted to help him with his flight reservations. When she asked him if he had been drinking, he told her that he'd had 100 drinks -- which, having seen the video, seems on the low end. The unidentified man whom Benham would later kick in the junk came to her defense. Benham called him a "San Frisco faggot" and then punched him in the right eye, the man said. It's at this point the recorded portion of the video begins:


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The Week in Stars Hockey: Discovering Godzilla, How Not To Stop Pucks

Categories: Sports

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Mike Mezeul
Not sure about the cowboy hat, really. Wrong sport for that.
Here are some other things I like about ice hockey.

See Also: Our Englishman Falls In Love With Weird-Ass Hockey

There are approximately 11 billion shots per game (I discovered this number using a complex analysis that may or may not be flawed). There are so many shots that you need intermissions just to calm down. It's tiring watching hockey if you support a team. Your heart is in your mouth every 11 seconds.

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Unpopular Toll Road Idea We Said Was Dead Might Not Be Dead

Categories: Transportation

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Mark Haslett
Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, is no longer recommending Texas Turnpike Corp.'s private toll road project. But the state still sort-of is.
North Texas' regional transportation officials recently announced that they would no longer recommend forcing people out of their homes in the countryside northeast of Dallas to build another toll road, because it turned out that people didn't like the idea. "We thought we had consensus that we should proceed in this direction, and obviously we were wrong," said Michael Morris, transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments, when we talked last week.

But does a regional transportation official's recommendation even mean anything anymore? In this fast-paced world of Texas transportation officials and unpopular toll road projects, the state is sending mixed messages about whether the toll road is really dead.


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Nurse Amber Vinson Is Headed Home, Free from Ebola

Categories: Healthcare

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KXAS via Twitter
Amber Vinson hugs her doctor at the close of her press conference at Emory.
Amber Vinson, the second Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital to contract Ebola during treatment of Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, is being released from Emory University Hospital near Atlanta.

"I'm so grateful to be well," she said. "While this is a day of celebration and gratitude, I'd like to request that we don't lose focus on the thousands of families still being affected by the disease in West Africa."

During her stay at Emory, Vinson received blood plasma from Dr. Kent Brantly and Dr. Nancy Writebol, both of whom were also received successful Ebola treatment at Emory.

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If Ebola House Is Funny, Why Not Breast Cancer House? C'mon! Lighten up!

Categories: Schutze

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Wikipedia
I'm just trying to think of other ways to make body bags funny.

It has taken me a long while -- I was slow -- but I guess now I sort of get why some people think the "Ebola House" is funny. Sort of. Still working on it.

Decorated for Halloween as an Ebola disaster area and located in a rich part of Dallas called "The Park Cities," the Ebola House strikes some people as funny because Ebola is such an exotic, distant, far-fetched phenomenon.

It's OK to make fun of Ebola in the Park Cities area of Dallas because something about Ebola itself is funny -- the faraway places it comes from, perhaps, or the kind of people who get it. Something. Still trying to put my finger on the real joke.


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Ill-Conceived Fort Worth-to-Kazakhstan Gun Smuggling Operation Foiled by ATF, Stupidity

Categories: Crime

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The United States' gun-show loophole is as wide open as it's ever been. Any private citizen with a cache of firearms can still sell them to any other private citizen without conducting a background check, as licensed dealers are required to do, because freedom.

There's a catch. The loophole, gaping though it may be, is not quite wide enough to accommodate a couple of sketchy foreign nationals stockpiling weapons for shipment to a former Soviet Republic.

According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, aspiring international arms dealers Fedor Belov and Aleksandr Yezersky of Kazakhstan learned this the hard way over the weekend when they were arrested following a gun-shopping expedition at The Original Fort Worth Gun Show.

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