FrontBurner

A few weeks back, I took a little road trip to Fannin County, an hour and a half north of Dallas, to see something crazy. It’s 120 billion gallons of water puddled on the Blackland Prairie—or it soon will be. Bois d’Arc Lake, the first Texas reservoir built in nearly 30 years, to keep Frisco and Plano hydrated, still has about 10 feet to go before it’s full. So I wanted to see the lake—this engineering marvel and monument of hubris—but I was also curious to meet those few folks who were lucky enough to own land on a new shoreline. Your family runs a hay farm for a hundred years, and then you suddenly have a lake house. Just imagine.

Then imagine how dumb I felt standing on FM Rd. 1396, staring at where the road disappears into the lake, surrounded by a whole bunch of nothing. No disrespect to the citizens of Fannin. There aren’t any lake houses yet. I drove around on some dodgy gravel roads and found some farmhouses not far from the water, but notes left in about a dozen mailboxes did not produce a single phone call to your intrepid correspondent. I know. Shocking.

What I did find, near a bridge on the west side of the lake, was a gleaming new building for the North Texas Municipal Water District and the lake manager for Bois d’Arc, Jennifer Stanley. I would here like to formally apologize to Stanley for showing up without an appointment and thank her for being kind enough to talk with me anyway about water impoundment and fishing and where to find a good hamburger.

That’s the one bit of useful information I can offer from my road trip. The Bois d’Arc General Store at Nana’s Place (4831 E. FM Rd. 1396; 903-664-4004) is the only place to eat anywhere near the water, which is not to suggest it is on the water. Not even close. But when the lake is full and they start selling lots, if you head up that way to check out some property, don’t miss Nana’s Place. You’ll find an American flag flapping in front of the tiny turquoise roadhouse and Nana herself at the grill. If it’s Friday, consider the catfish. Otherwise, you won’t be disappointed by the burger. And onion rings. Get the onion rings.  

Unlike the land around Bois d’Arc Lake, there are plenty of lake houses scattered around North Texas. In our April issue, we spent a few pages highlighting them: Cedar Creek, Lake Texoma, Lake Cypress Springs, Lake Athens, Possum Kingdom Lake, and the aforementioned Bois d’Arc Lake. That story is online today, and you can read it here.

Teen Dies in Crash at White Rock Lake. Near the White Rock Spillway, as Sharon Grigsby reports, there is a three-quarter-mile stretch of trail that is dangerously close to the cars shooting east and west along Garland Road. On Tuesday, a 19-year-old driver who appeared to be speeding—or, at least, more technically traveling “at a high rate of speed”—jumped his Silverado over the curb and ended as a mess of twisted metal in a patch of trees. The teenager died at the scene. Grigsby’s piece is well worth your time, both offering respect to the family while calling for the city to do something to protect others at this highly-used amenity. After all, the Texas Department of Transportation controls Garland Road, and its interest is in moving cars. The city’s interest should be in keeping pedestrians safe.

One of Two Men Who Fell in Trinity Found Dead. Edyn Oswaldo Yat Choc and Juan Rubén Chel Botzoc were cleaning a grill in the Trinity River on Sunday when they fell in. Botzoc, 21, was found about 100 yards south of a small dam. Officers are still trying to locate Choc’s body.

Organizers Push Legislature to Honor Koreatown. A bill that would give the community along Royal Lane in northwest Dallas official designation was heard in a Texas House committee this week. That designation allows for state-funded signage and the designation for cultural arts, formally recognizing its importance to the city.

Warm Weekend Ahead. We’re looking at highs in the low-to-mid 80s tonight and tomorrow, which dip down into a much improved 74 on Sunday. Rain chances are around 20 percent through early next week.

Today, we are publishing online a column I wrote for the April issue of D Magazine. It’s about crime and about the data, about how the city’s public leaders handle the good news and the bad news and how they communicate it to the public. The story is largely about the years 2021 and 2022. I filed it in early March, before 34 people died by homicide that month, which the Dallas Morning News declared to be the deadliest month in the city in a little under three years.

As a postscript to the column, which you can read here, let’s look at the most recent data around violent crime in Dallas. There have been about 195 fewer incidents of violence—murders, aggravated assaults, robberies, and rapes—as of April 13 compared to the same period last year. That’s a decline of 6.81 percent, according to the Dallas Police Department data dashboard.

Thirteen more people have died by homicide or non-negligent manslaughter so far this year compared to 2022. Police spokeswoman Melinda Gutierrez says homicides are up 18.31 percent as of April 12. That’s an improvement over the last 13 days. DPD’s top officials briefed the City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Monday, as they do each month. The DPD briefing showed a 29.32 percent year-to-date increase in homicides through the end of March. So you can see how the numbers rise and fall over short periods.

As more proof of the variance, WFAA on March 20 reported a 40 percent year-to-date increase in homicides. The Dallas Observer tick-tocked all this reporting, too, focusing on the murders.

But other violent crime is down year over year. Aggravated assaults are down about 3 percent. Robberies are down 9 percent, with business robberies down more than 35 percent.

That WFAA report was a short profile of a nonprofit called Urban Specialists, which works with DPD to provide “violence interrupters” to help steer kids away from violent crime. It included an interview with Tarleton State University criminologist Alex del Carmen, who noted, “People focus on homicides because it is the scariest of all the crimes to take place.”

He mentioned the need to be patient with crime data, about how they frequently dip and jump. The police department monitors these spikes to try to figure out how to respond to violent crime.

The way to draw broad conclusions is over longer periods of time, understanding the data in the short term will deviate and tell different stories about how the department’s strategies are working.

“We just have to be patient and see how these numbers unravel,” del Carmen told WFAA.

Yes, it’s important to track data around violent crime. But it’s also important to couch it with the understanding that trends appear over a long period of time, not a single month. Police use the data to direct resources to try to combat these trends; the city is also using data to inform where to target public improvements to eliminate the physical characteristics of where crime happens. (Things like blight remediation, additional LED lighting, and parks.)

A lot has happened in the six weeks since I filed my story. But the gist remains on point. Read it here and you’ll see why.

Thanks to movie (and TV) magic, Reunion Tower has doubled as Las Vegas, been the backdrop for some Walker, Texas Ranger fisticuffs, been hit by an asteroid, stood in for a futuristic Detroit, and starred in at least one dramatic final scene on TV. That tower has seen some stuff.

This weekend, Reunion Tower turns 45. The city will mark that occasion by lighting up the Dallas skyline in pink and teal. But before The Ball has its birthday, let’s take a look back at its beginnings.

On February 5, Mayor Eric Johnson wanted to share some good news about crime numbers in Dallas. In his weekly email newsletter and in a post on Medium, he included a photo of himself hugging police Chief Eddie García. The chief was seated at a desk, looking down at crime data. The mayor, standing behind García, was leaning in to hug him, draped over the city’s top cop like a shawl. 

Along with the photo, Johnson included a chart created by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a police organization that García serves as president. The chart presented Dallas as the only large American city where all types of violent crime had declined over the previous two years. Johnson wanted to show people that the two public officials are so aligned in their efforts, and so successful in getting results, that the mayor had to hug the chief. 

The image itself was inelegant. Hugs are better when both people are standing. But the message was clear. Yet six days elapsed with no local news coverage of the rankings. So Johnson took to Twitter. 

“Our local media have no interest in reporting on this data, which is why you haven’t heard about it,” he wrote. Reporters with the Dallas Morning News, WFAA, Fox 4, KRLD, and NBC 5 responded with links to stories about Dallas’ declining violent crimes—but they didn’t mention the other nine cities in the chart.  

Johnson then tweeted an adage about defensiveness he’d learned from his grandmother: if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, the one that gets hit will yelp. “Them hit dogs still hollerin’,” the mayor wrote. He added that journalistic “quality has fallen off a cliff” and called it “pathetic.” 

Here’s the thing about that chart: the ranking was bogus. Comparing one city’s crime numbers to another’s is a reductive exercise that ignores how data are collected and fails to tell the real story about how things are going. Plus, the FBI recently modernized how it collects data. Its new system does away with what it called the “hierarchy rule,” where departments were basically allowed to juke the stats on a technicality. Meaning, if a robbery goes bad and someone ends up dead, police departments filed only the most severe charge—murder—and ignored the others. Now every crime in an incident is tracked and submitted to the feds. Dallas follows this process, but four of the 10 cities in the mayor’s chart do not. 

Promoting that ranking was political boosterism that obscures what we should be analyzing and discussing: what about Dallas’ new approach to curbing violence is working and what is not? Because the department’s data do indeed show progress. 

Tom Thumb Incentivized to Come to RedBird. The Dallas City Council Wednesday voted to approve nearly $6 million in incentives to bring a Tom Thumb grocery store to the RedBird area of southern Dallas. The proposed full-service store will have a pharmacy and will offer both pickup and delivery of groceries. Construction is scheduled to begin later this year, and the store is expected to open in 2025.

Your Zip Code Can Determine How Long You’ll Live. A new assessment of county health needs conducted by Parkland Health and Dallas County Health and Human Services revealed that heart disease and cancer are still the leading causes of death in the county. The data also revealed that there can be as much as a 23-year gap in life expectancy between zip codes in the county because of health disparities. The Dallas County Community Health Needs Assessment is conducted every three years.

Man Accused of Killing Cafe Momentum Intern Arrested. U.S. Marshals arrested Donald Moore Jr. in connection with a shooting downtown on April 5 that killed 17-year-old Omarian Jamal Frazier and injured another teen. Both victims were interns at Cafe Momentum. Dallas police have not released details into what led to the fatal shooting or a possible motive.

Trial on Crane Collapse Starts. Jury selection began this week for the first trial for a victim of the 2019 crane collapse at the Elan City Lights apartment complex in Old East Dallas that severely damaged apartments and killed a 29-year-old woman. The crane collapsed during a severe storm in June 2019 that caused wind gusts of up to 70 mph.

Twins Get Homecoming. AmieLynn and JamieLynn Finley, formerly conjoined twins who were separated at Cook Children’s Hospital in January, are now at home. The twins’ surgery was the first of its kind at the hospital, and took 11 hours and 25 medical professionals.

The story you’re about to read begins with a $5.35 purchase on Amazon.

It’s a used copy of a 2011 book called Arise: Live Out Your Faith and Dreams on Whatever Field You Find Yourself, and it’s written by Clayton Kershaw, his wife, Ellen, and Ellen’s sister, Ann Higginbottom. It’s a breezy read, 200 pages on the dot. Autographed, too. As far as $5.35 purchases go, I’ve done far worse.

I bought this book back in November, once I knew I was going to be profiling the Kershaws. It’s always good journalistic practice to read someone’s book as research, no matter how dated, but in this case, it was essential. Clayton Kershaw doesn’t do a ton of press, which is a choice one can easily make upon becoming arguably the greatest pitcher in the last 50 years. He speaks even less frequently concerning topics beyond the baseball diamond. So if a book written by his 23-year-old self could shed any light on the man he is at 35, well, I was game to spend an afternoon of reading to find out.

And it did. You’ll see what I mean when you get into the story, but one passage from that book shaped the entire direction of my story after I sat down with the Kershaws in their University Park home. Turns out that Clayton and Ellen have something of a knack for envisioning where their lives are going and shaping their future accordingly. They’ll need it, too, because we’re now much closer to the end of Clayton’s baseball career than the start. What happens when it’s over?

That’s what we get into. If you’re a baseball fan, you’ll get more insight than you’ve seen before on where Clayton Kershaw’s final playing years might take him, including maybe, possibly, the Texas Rangers (yes, there’s a real chance of it happening).

If you aren’t, you’ll love reading about a Park Cities family that is made here, stayed here, and is working in the community here even after attaining superstardom in Los Angeles. The Kershaws always have been and always will be Dallasites. And now you can learn plenty about their world here—past, present, and future.

The story is the cover of our April issue and is online today.

Royse City Rep. Had ‘Inappropriate Relationship’ With Intern. State Rep. Bryan Slaton represents a Pac Man-shaped district that includes the swath of northeast Texas between Terrell and Tyler. Some of his colleagues are calling for his resignation after he allegedly invited a 20-year-old intern to his Austin apartment, gave her alcohol, and “urged her not to speak about the incident.” Slaton has retained a Rockwall-based criminal defense attorney and the complaint originated in the Texas House General Investigating Committee.

Family Sues Deep Ellum Bar After Fatal Shooting. The family of 30-year-old Danielle Maxine Jones is suing the bar Bitter End after she was struck and killed by a bullet meant for someone else. The lawsuit claims the bar did not have security present to stop the shooter from entering.

Texas House Advances Medical Marijuana Bill. House Bill 1805 easily passed the chamber on Wednesday, which would expand the state’s 2015 law that allows for Texas patients to use marijuana while treating epilepsy, autism, PTSD, and cancer. The bill also allows the Texas Department of State Health Services to expand eligible conditions without having to change state law. It now heads to the Texas Senate.

Mavs GM Nico Harrison Defends Kidd. Harrison held his end-of-season press conference with the media, and the one thing he seemed sure of—besides Luka being a Dallas Maverick—is that Jason Kidd will return next year.

This morning in Leading Off, I mentioned that the Morning News had published a misleading headline for a story that actually reported the opposite of what the headline implied. Headline: “8 Murders Occurred Near Dallas Trails in 2022, Police Say. That’s Not the Whole Story.” Then the subhead: “A little-noticed public safety briefing on the city’s hike-and-bike network turns up many concerns.”

The natural conclusion from reading just that headline is that murders are happening near Dallas trails, police aren’t giving us the whole story, and there are many reasons to be concerned. And remember: as this stuff gets pushed out on social media, lots of people read only the headlines.

But that’s not what the story says. Sharon Grigsby did a great job of hunting down more information about each of those murders, the mention of which in a community meeting made her curious. Her story says that the way DPD reported the information was bunk. To wit: “Permanently categorizing data based solely on the randomness of ‘trail’ or ‘park’ showing up in the first report is nonsensical. DPD can argue until hell freezes over that its location tracking in these eight cases is defensible, but the end result was misleading to anyone who saw the numbers.”

So, again, Grigsby wrote a story with good news about trails. The News copy editors wrote a scary headline with bad news about murder on the trails. The headline needs to be changed.

While we’re waiting for that to happen, here’s something way more fun about the trails. When Gene Davis read Leading Off this morning, he sent me a short video for a song he wrote called “On My Orange Bike.” He calls it a love song for the LOOP, the 50-mile trail circuit around the city. Davis does something called the Karate Dance Party. He said there was no need to mention him but that Friends of the SoPac Trail are throwing a garden party April 30 at 1 p.m. at the Pollinator Garden.

If the News copy editors wrote a headline for a story about that, I imagine it would be something like: “With Murders in Dallas on the Rise and Bee Colonies Collapsing, Trail Supporters Throw Party That Raises Concerns.”

Anyway, here’s the fun video:

If you’re someone who watches for butterflies, especially monarch butterflies, you probably know that it’s about that time of year when they start migrating the 2,800-miles from Mexico to Canada and the U.S.

Only, according to the World Wildlife Federation, there are far fewer Eastern migratory monarchs making that trek this year. In a recent post on its website, the organization said the presence of monarchs has dropped 22 percent, from 7 acres to about 5.5 acres of forest wintering grounds. At one time, monarchs covered more than 45 acres.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature added the migratory monarch to its Red List of Threatened Species last year.

“Monarchs require a vast, healthy migratory path and large, robust forests for survival through the winter,” the organization said in a press release last month. “Today, the butterflies face a reduction of breeding habitat in the U.S. due to herbicide application and land use changes as well as forest degradation in wintering sites in Mexico. Extreme weather conditions in all these ecosystems can further their decline.”

Among Domenico Seminara’s prized collection of some 500 cappuccino and espresso machines is the first appliance he ever sold, in 1981, a Faema 1 Group that looks more like a fax machine than something that would yield a cappuccino, which, according to Seminara, is “a cup of coffee—with romance.” He bought back the machine years later to keep in his “cappuccino museum.”  

The museum occupies a sunny room on the second floor of his Minion-​yellow Arlington warehouse, lined on one side by a row of windows that face I-30 and, on the other side, by windows that look into a cavernous facility filled with the used gadgets and gizmos Seminara sells via his business, Specialty Restaurant Equipment.

Many of the machines in Seminara’s personal collection (there are hundreds more in the warehouse) are vintage Elektra models in the “old Italy” style, brass domes topped with eagle figurines. The oldest machine in his collection is a shiny 1948 Gaggia that he scored for a bargain from a Venezuelan restaurateur in Paris, Texas. 

He has also customized several machines. One features images of Native American notables that were airbrushed by an Albuquerque artist. Another was fashioned after the Parthenon; he almost sold it to a Dallas Cowboy two decades ago, but then the athlete balked at the machine’s $20,000 price tag. “I said, ‘You get millions of dollars from Jerry Jones,’ ” Seminara says. “You ask me to lower the price by a couple thousand dollars. I will not lower one penny.”