exposuredallas.com

When police arrived at 3:30 this morning, they found the woman sitting in an otherwise empty parking lot off Stemmons Freeway in Northwest Dallas, her face swollen and her upper lip bleeding. She was distraught and not a little drunk, and kept repeating "He's going to kill them! He's going to kill the babysitter and my kids! Please help!"

The people standing around her were strangers. They'd been there to watch a man run her over, his car dragging for 100 feet before she came loose and he drove away. They'd rushed to see if she was OK, then called police. They weren't sure what the woman was referring to.

Eventually, the woman, a 26-year-old from Fort Worth, calmed down enough to give the officers a narrative of the night's events. She'd been leaving her house at 11:30 on Monday night when her boyfriend, or maybe her ex-boyfriend (a police report doesn't specify), drove up and told her to get in the car. When she refused, he punched her, then put a gun to her head. Reluctantly, she stepped into the passenger seat.

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Via.

Officer Jennifer Bell and Corporal D.J. Lusty remember the night of April 9, 2011 quite clearly. The Fort Worth cops were working off-duty traffic jobs at Texas Motor Speedway following the Samsung Mobile 500 when Bell spotted a golf cart driving on the grass. She watched as the cart laden with three grown men weaved between idling cars lined up to leave the parking lot, then almost run over a person walking by. The cart almost hit Bell, too, as she ordered the driver to stop and grabbed at his arm as he passed. Lusty caught sight of the cart after his colleague radioed for help. He caught a glancing blow on the arm as they ignored his orders to stop.

The three men might have escaped had the golf cart been equipped with a more powerful engine. As it was, Lusty jogged beside the cart, at first attempting to steer it into the fence, then just jumping onto the back. "What's the problem, officer?" the driver, soon IDed as Donald Lewis, asked.

Lewis and his friends remember the night somewhat differently. They had been driving the golf cart through the parking lot, sure, but they hadn't known they were in trouble with the police. Each said he thought Bell was a lowly parking attendant chiding them for driving on the grass. And Lewis insisted they had never come close to hitting anyone, just "the dude that jumped in the way." Which happened to be Lusty.

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When a pantsless young man runs into his backyard in the wee hours of the morning and shines a laser pointer at a police helicopter overhead, criminal charges are sure to follow.

But what if you're in a Walmart checkout line fully clothed and decide to test that new light-emitting gadget you literally just purchased on that cop standing over yonder? Monumentally stupid to be sure, but criminal?

A Mr. Evans (his first name isn't listed in a police report) set out for the Walmart Supercenter at LBJ and Forest Lane early this morning in search of an answer. Actually, it was probably more a spur-of-the-moment thing, but either way. It was 3:45 a.m. He had a freshly unwrapped laser pointer in his hand. Stephen Vineyard, a Dallas police officer in full uniform, was standing not far away.

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The LGBT Resource Center at Texas A&M University, like its cousins at the University of Texas and the University of Houston, is an innocuous arm of school bureaucracy that offers an array of resources to gay and transgendered students. There is a guest speaker program, a lending library, networking opportunities, LGBT awareness events, information on counseling, connections to advocacy groups both on- and off-campus. Like we said: innocuous.

But State Rep. Bill Zedler, the Arlington Republican, seems to think these organizations are more akin to San Francisco bathhouses circa 1980. As the Voice noted yesterday, Zedler filed an amendment to the Senate budget that would cut funding for "Gender and Sexuality Centers and Related Student Centers."

He goes on to explain his reasoning: such centers "support, promote or encourage any behavior that would lead to high risk behavior for AIDS, HIV, Hepatitis B, or any sexually transmitted disease."

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Late yesterday evening, about 8 p.m., four Dallas police cars descended on a the 2800 block of South Avenue, lights and sirens blazing. They'd been told there was a major disturbance on the South Dallas street, and that one of those involved was hurling legitimate-seeming death threats.

Officers arrived to find the neighborhood strangely quiet, with no signs of a fight. The only person they saw was a middle-aged man in the alley who took off sprinting when he saw the squad cars.

He didn't make it far. He came to a stop after 15 yards and turned to officers. He was clearly hysterical, they wrote in an incident report, and they cuffed him as a precaution. Then they asked if he'd called 911.

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The life of a tax office mail clerk seems that it'd be dull. Box after cardboard box of IRS forms, IRS instruction manuals and IRS paraphernalia, with only an occasional piece of computer equipment to spice things up.

So, yesterday's special delivery must have come as a surprise to the clerk at a Far North Dallas tax office tucked behind the Studio Movie Grill at Central and Spring Valley Road. It was decently sized cube, 15 inches per side, and addressed to someone named Mike Jones. No Mike Jones worked at the tax office, but the address (13999 Goldmark Drive) and suite number (300) were correct, so the clerk figured it was a box of checks.

It was not. Inside, he found two Tupperware containers wrapped in tissue paper. Unwrapping one of them, the clerk discovered a vacuum-sealed freezer bag packed tight with marijuana. The tax office had not, he was pretty sure, ordered any weed.

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Richard Railey

Richard Railey is definitely not an idiotic, racist troll. Nope, he's just your average 56-year-old community college student, pursuing an associates degree in IT security while trying to form a White Student Union at Tarrant County College. Burnt Orange Report wrote about Railey's quest this morning, and also referred to Railey as a former GOP precinct chair in Tarrant County.

That's not quite correct, as it turns out. Railey is a current GOP precinct chair, in district 1056. That's according to Shelly Pritchard, the Tarrant County GOP's executive director.

"His name's so familiar to me," she said thoughtfully. "I know he's real active."

"He's trying to form a white student union at the community college right now," I told her.

There was a long pause.

"He's doing whaaaaat?" Pritchard replied, finally. "No comment with me," she added. And then, "Wow."

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Chanon Thompson, a 33-year-old woman from Carrollton, traveled to New Mexico last week and wandered into the Santa Fe National Forest. She made it six or seven miles in, then she realized she couldn't find her way back, according to ABC News. She spent two nights in freezing temperatures before she was rescued by the New Mexico State Police.

Thompson was no mere hiker intent on enjoying one of America's few relatively unspoiled places. She was a treasure seeker, eager to get her hands a treasure chest stuffed with close to $3 million in gold and jewels hidden there.

That seemingly far-fetched idea, Thompson told police, was planted in her mind by The Thrill of the Chase, the 2010 autobiography of millionaire arts and antiquities dealer Forrest Fenn.

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The charming Reverend Robert Jeffress

New York Jets quarterback Tim Tebow is scheduled to speak at First Baptist Dallas at 9:15 a.m. on April 28. Tebow is very open about the role religion plays in his life (good for him), and First Baptist Dallas Reverend Robert Jeffress is also very open about his beliefs, like this factually inaccurate snippet:

"There are a disproportionate amount of assaults against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals, you can't deny that."

That's from a seminar released last July called "What to Say to Those Who are Gay, Part 2." In it, Jeffress explains that's being gay is "a degradation of a person's mind and if a person will sink that low and there are no restraints from God's law, then there is no telling to whatever sins he will commit as well."

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It was intended as a creative way of showing seventh grade history students at Schrade Middle School in Rowlett how cowboys would corral wayward steers during cattle drives. But somehow, astonishingly, the teacher's decision to actually lasso his students ended badly.

It went like this, according to a WFAA report from Tuesday: the teacher, who isn't identified, took his students outside, asked for volunteers, then had them run across a field while he tossed a rope around their neck. The parents of one of the kids, unhappy when their son arrived home with bruises around his neck, complained to the school and local TV station, causing the teacher to be suspended.

But now the teacher's supporters are rallying to his defense.

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