Houston News Blog

​Gotcha!

That's been the news so far this week from the police and sheriff's office, whose detectives have been clearing old cases and racking up arrests.

The Harris County Sheriff's office announced today that they've bagged a pair of dishonest drug dealers with a penchant for gunplay.

Back in August, a deputy was scouring the area near the 10200 block of State Highway 249 looking for drug dealers when he got a call over the police radio that there was a dead body lying in the middle of the freeway. It was a man named John Froehlich.

Investigators initially believed that Froehlich was trying to buy drugs when he began arguing with the dealer, who then shot Froehlich. But detectives now say they know what really happened in the wee hours that morning.

​Last year we wrote about how the Texas prison system was a bit haphazard in deciding which books to ban inmates from receiving (for instance, all S/M-related activity is strictly verboten, yet The Pleasure's All Mine, The Memoir of a Professional Submissive was approved).

A deputy editor at Cruising World magazine ran across our items while researching the TDCJ policy (or, perhaps, researching S/M activity; we don't judge). Why? She had tried to send two books to an inmate and the TDCJ nixed them.

Manning Up in Alaska and Red Water, Blue Water, Salt Water were the books. Manning Up in Alaska we could see, since it's probably an unending gay orgy under the midnight sun. But the other one? Some weird fetish thing?

None of the above, TDCJ spokesperson Michelle Lyons tells Hair Balls. The books were banned because an accompanying letter indicated the inmate would be receiving a $100 for reviewing them.

Photos by Mike Giglio

​Beneath an almost full moon on Halloween night the (probably) drunk man tried to follow the tip of the officer's pen with his eyes.

Behind him a parade of costumed yuppies shuffled between Washington Avenue's trendy bars: sexy school girls, sexy devils, mobsters, Facebook.

Officer Don Egdorf waved his pen from side to side. Egdorf is one of 14 members of a local task force dedicated to finding and arresting drunk drivers. And he had a Halloween-worthy persona of his own: what DWI attorneys call a "vampire cop."

"Because they're out there looking for blood," says Tyler Flood, the flashy defense attorney who brags about getting drunk drivers off the hook and is the subject of this week's upcoming cover story out on the web this Wednesday.

​No one likes being punished for something they didn't do. Even more so when the punishment is a series of deadly bullet wounds. But that's exactly what happened to Quincey Taylor, Houston police say.

A little more than three months ago, police got a call about a shooting that was happening at the Hollow Park Apartments at 2550 Joel Wheaton Road. When officers arrived, they found Taylor, 18, in a nearby grassy area. He had been shot to death several times.

Detectives began investigating and later learned that the apartment of a man named Kenneth Glass Jr. had been burglarized shortly before the shooting. Glass was pissed, police say, and wanted revenge.

courtesy of HPD

Moses Reed

​Houston police have closed the books on yet another homicide after tracking down the final suspect in a deadly carjacking.

Moses Reed, 17, was arrested last week and charged with murder for the July 15 slaying of 53-year-old Huu Khanh Phung. Detectives had previously arrested a juvenile on the same charge who was allegedly connected to the killing.

Police say that Phung was driving along in a silver Chevy Cobalt when he stopped at a red light at the intersection of Cullen and Alameda Genoa. That's when, according to witnesses, one of the teens hopped out of a minivan and rushed over to Phung's car. Several gunshots were heard, police say, and both the minivan and the Chevy were seen fleeing the area. Phung, who had been shot to death, was found lying in the middle of the street.

Reed is currently behind bars at the Harris County jail without bond.

Most killings, police say, are not as random as an arbitrary carjacking. The majority are between folks who know each other. And there were plenty of those last week.

A disgruntled ex-Subway mascot, perhaps?

​Fresh bread, healthy options, elaborate sneeze-guards -- some people just really love Subway. And Crime Stoppers and local law enforcement are asking for the public's help in identifying "The Repeat Subway Robber" -- a dude who's robbed the Subway at 2002 Runnels at least three times since September 22.

According to Crime Stoppers, the thin black male "pulls up to the front of the Subway...and goes inside the sandwich shop. He jumps over the counter and takes money from the cash register before leaving the store." Note: he appears to have extremely long braids. (We couldn't help but notice how the guy is "thin," which leads us to believe that, in addition to being a Subway robber, he may also be a Subway patron.)

He hit the location September 22nd, October 4th, and October 10th.

He's older and well dressed, robbing a bank.

​A couple of bank robberies this week in the area have us wondering if it's too easy to rob a bank these days.

Take the "older, well dressed man" who robbed a bank yesterday in northwest Houston:

He approached the teller counter and took the teller by surprise when he demanded she fill his blue plastic shopping bag with cash. When the teller hesitated, he aggressively repeated the demand. The teller complied and the robber quietly and calmly exited the bank on foot.

"She thought [the robber] had a gun on him," FBI spokeswoman Shauna Dunlap tells Hair Balls. "But it turns out, after interviewing other witnesses, it looks like it was probably a cellphone."

Hair Balls is certainly not condoning bank robbery by calling it easy, and plenty of robbers still go in armed. All we're saying is, if you have to rob a bank, consider that the pen is just as mighty as the sword.

​Some blog items never die.

Almost a year ago we wrote about the fraud charges filed against officials of the Fishers of Men Worship Center in Houston. To this day, barely a week goes by without someone throwing up another comment on the case, either defending the officials or saying they got what they deserve. Go ahead, peruse the 200-plus comments if you like. We gave up on it a long time ago.

And the winner in the great Critics vs. Defenders debate is....The Critics!!

The U.S. Attorney's office announced this morning that a trio of church officials entered guilty pleas on their fraud charges.

At the hearing this morning before United States District Judge David Hittner, Pastor Sheila Diana Washington, 49, and deacon/church treasurer Tony Overstreet, 44, pleaded guilty to bank fraud arising out of a student loan fraud scheme. They each face up to 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1,000,000 at their sentencing hearing scheduled for Jan. 26, 2010, at 9:15 a.m.

At the same hearing this morning, Pastor Eric Washington, 56, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States by having Fishers of Men submit grossly inflated claims for reimbursement to Harris County for a FEMA-funded program that reimbursed groups sheltering Hurricane Katrina evacuees during fall 2005.

Photo courtesy Marshall Wice

​You know, when the Houston Press names someone the Best Criminal Defense Attorney, we expect that the high honor will result in further good works -- it's the whole Obama-Nobel Prize train of thought.

So it should come as no surprise this morning that recent winner Brian Wice won a slam-dunk victory in a high-profile case, getting the Court of Criminal Appeals -- of Texas, no less -- to vote 9-0 that his client deserved a new hearing on the punishment given her.

The client? Susan Wright, a woman who killed her abusive husband, a woman whose trial featured a prosecutor tying a fellow prosecutor to a bed in the courtroom and then pretending to stab him 200 times.

The CCA, not the world's most sympathetic forum for defendants, agreed that Wright's trial lawyer had rendered what they call "ineffective assistance of counsel" during her case. By, for instance, not stopping the farcical melodrama staged by prosecutors.

​Episcopalians going to today's noon service at Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral can expect to be harassed by those dang folks from the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Network co-founder and president Barbara Blaine is in town to drum up awareness over the November 3 trial involving three former Austin Episcopal boarding school students who say the Episcopal Diocese of Texas covered up sexual abuse they allegedly suffered at the hands of now-defrocked priest James Tucker.

Specifically, Blaine is outraged by what appears to be the diocese's insistence to settle and seal the case. Blaine, who herself is a victim of a priest's abuse, says it's crucial that victims not be forced to keep any part of their experiences in the dark.

"They shouldn't have to keep any secrets....the victims speaking out is a gift to the church," Blaine told Hair Balls. "We kept our secrets for years, and that's how so many of our perpetrators got to more kids....Tucker was only stopped after kids started telling."

​On one hand, you have to tip your John Deere hat and salute this little feat of deep East Texas Redneck ingenuity and derring-do. On the other hand, you just have to wonder WTF they were thinking.

The Web site of Jasper radio station KJAS picks up the tale:

According to Jasper County Deputy Mike Smith, he was on routine patrol on Highway 96, just north of Kirbyville, at about 5:00 when he spotted a 1/2 ton Dodge pickup truck struggling to pull a 16 foot lowboy trailer with a ten-ton oil pump on it. Smith said the truck had a flat tire, and one wheel on the trailer was completely gone.

According to Smith, the truck and trailer were creating a huge shower of sparks on the highway, which caught his attention.

As it might any attentive patrolman...

​As the temperature slowly begins to dip, so too it seems that the number of murdered bodies found in and around Houston are fewer and fewer.

But that certainly doesn't mean there's no action for the police.

On Wednesday at about 8:30 p.m., a 37-year-old woman and her roommate began arguing in their home at 5504 Wipprecht Street. That quarrel soon turned into an all-out fight, police say, when the woman began assaulting her roommate. Fearing for her safety, the roommate grabbed a gun and called 911. But when the woman allegedly assaulted the roommate once again, police say, the roommate used the gun to allegedly protect herself, firing a fatal shot into the woman's head.

Police have not yet released the names of the two women but say the Harris County District Attorney's Office is looking at the case to determine if charges are warranted.

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​You know what you just hate when you're on a motorcycle trying to get away from a DPS trooper because you're wanted on a burglary charge?

Pregnant women who slam their cars into drug stores.

The sad tale of 18-year-old Daniel Nuno of League City proves the point. Nuno was on his motorcycle in Friendswood yesterday, trying calmly to get away from an inquisitive DPS trooper intent on chasing him, when all of a sudden he saw a bunch of flashing red lights up ahead.

Why? A pregnant woman had slammed her vehicle into the wall at a Walgreens (Hey, these things happen), and just about every Friendswood emergency vehicle was out responding to the scene at FM 528 and West Bay Area Boulevard. (The woman was uninjured, as it turns out.)

But, as Friendswood police public information officer Karen Peterson tells Hair Balls, the fleet of police cars, a fire truck and ambulance responding to the scene blocked traffic.

And then, she says, "here comes this guy, and he's trying to avoid all these red lights because he's got one behind him, and he thought he was going to go down the sidewalk," she says.

​Michael Sadowski, a 51-year-old League City resident, was charged with possession of child pornography today and held without bond, the U.S. Attorney's office announced.

Sadowski set up a correspondence with the owner of a kiddie porn website who, darn the luck, turned out to be a federal agent.

But even if Sadowski was leery, you can hardly blame him for going through with the transaction: The feds were offering bargain-basement prices. Just fifteen bucks got a video that featured "prepubescent and pubescent girls engaging in oral sex, masturbation and other sexual activity," the U.S. Attorney's office said.

Really, who could resist those prices? We mean who, of course, besides someone who would be utterly repulsed at how sick a human being he had become. Sadowski ordered seven.

When agents came to arrest him, they found:

​It was just before midnight on Friday when Houston police officer M.J. Marin looked up toward a second-floor balcony at the Cobblestone Apartments at 8435 Winkler. And what he saw was savage: a man plunging a knife into a woman.

Marin raced up to the apartment, police say, where he saw the knifeman at it again, this time turning the attention of his sharp weapon on a man, stabbing him repeatedly. Marin drew his gun and demanded that the man drop his weapon, police say, but he ignored the order. And just as the knifeman was about to drive his blade through the man once more, Marin fired, three times, killing the attacker.

It turned out, police say, that the guy with the knife was stabbing his girlfriend, when a man nearby who tried to help her was also attacked. He died at the scene. The girl was taken to the hospital and is expected to live, police say. The police have not yet released the names of any of the people involved.

As is customary in officer-involved shootings, HPD's Internal Affairs Division and the Harris County DA's office will investigate.

Illustration courtesy FBI

​For more than 19 years, Dennis Earl Bradford has lived with the knowledge that he raped an eight-year-old girl, slit her throat, left her for dead in a field -- and got away with it.

Until today, when a combination of law-enforcement agencies announced they had cracked the very cold case and charged Bradford with attempted capital murder.

Bradford took young Jennifer Schuett from her Dickinson home against her will in August 1990, the FBI announced, and then raped and killed her (See comments). Schuett's body was discovered by kids about 14 hours later.

The case had stymied Dickinson police for years, but advances in DNA technology helped break it.

​Here's a letter no high school principal wants to write: "Hey parents! One of our teachers was getting it on with a student. Oh and, hey, you know, while I've got your attention and everything, one of our other teachers is being investigated for the same thing. Go Lions!!!"

That's not quite the wording that Spring High principal Donna Ullrich used, but we guess you have to be a little more nuanced in getting bad news out.

Ullrich informed parentsin "an URGENT letter" that Spring science teacher Deanna Higgins (pictured, via KHOU; let the inappropriate comments begin!) had been charged with having sex with "improper relationship between an educator and a student, and one for sexual assault of a child. Both charges are second-degree felonies."

The gender of the student was not specified, but we're guessing it's either male or female.

Ullrich wasn't done with her news, though:

Photo courtesy HCSO

​A week ago we had a not-creepy-looking-at-all guy arrested for doing creepy things to a corpse. Today's corpse-related news, courtesy of the Houston Chronicle, involves a passed-out guy druggin' it up with someone who turns out to be dead. While both were in a closet.

Not a metaphorical closet, either. A real one, on an isolated farm.

Good news for Houstonian Cody Plant, though: Charges of abusing the corpse were dropped. Prosecutors had claimed he "treated the body 'in an offensive manner,'" the Chron reported, but
"the charge was dropped this morning after a judge examined the allegations in a probable cause hearing."

"For this, I went to law school?" the judge somehow didn't say.

Plant and the body were discovered asleep in the closet by the owners of the house, resulting in an all-time quote from Mark Herman of the Precinct 4 Constable's office.

Photo by Txrelichunter

​Here at Hair Balls and the Houston Press, we really love the Lone Star Saloon. Really. That's why we hope that police take swift action and find the dirty, dirty bastard that stole 21 bottles of liquor from Lone Star last weekend.

"I hope they catch the S.O.B.," Joe Lee Thomas, the Lone Star's owner, tells Hair Balls. "They took the most expensive liquor."

He lost about $800 to $1,000 in booze.

The crime is a bit of a mystery, because the thief didn't break into Lone Star, and the front door was found unlocked the next morning, Thomas says. He has a couple theories.
 

​Houston's historic Heights neighborhood is under siege. In just two months, 12 suspicious fires at local residences have taken place, all within a couple of blocks of each other.

The latest incident occurred in the dark hours of the morning on October 2. Around 2 a.m., firefighters responded a fire at 1030 ½ Ashland. One resident, Eliud Limon, was sleeping in the garage apartment when he woke up to a bang outside the apartment. He told the Houston Chronicle that he went outside and saw smoke coming from the downstairs garage. He woke up the other two individuals who were staying at the apartment. No one was injured in the incident.

Limon and company were already planning on moving out, and with good reason. The garage apartment sat on an otherwise empty lot. The lot was the scene of a series of fires that burned down a duplex that once stood there. The first time the duplex on 1030 Ashland caught on fire was August 8. Throughout the following days, the duplex would be victimized a couple of more times.

One neighbor who didn't want his name used told Hair Balls how it began to look a little more suspicious after each incident.
 

​Can't find a match on Match.com? Can't get it in tune on eHarmony? Desperate for a young hottie, but not exactly a catch yourself and unable to fly to Russia for a mail order bride? We've got a dating sight for you: Jailbabes.

Jailbabes is just like any other dating site, except all of the women on there are incarcerated. And there might be a few more disclaimers than usual, such as this one:

"These ads are written by unique individuals expressing their desires. They may or may not be complete fabrications of wishful thinking."

(How's that different than any other dating site?)

And this one:

"You can find more information about the inmate, including their crime, by calling their prison directly and/or using an Internet search engine (MSN, Dogpile, Google, Yahoo!, etc.). When using an Internet search engine try putting the word PRISONER either before or after the inmate's name."

And finally, this one, from a Texas prison official:

​We've written several items about Jamie Leigh Jones, the local woman who is suing KBR over a gang-rape she says happened while she was working for the company in Iraq.

The company put up roadblocks to her attempts to resolve the situation and her claims of rampant sexual harassment in KBR camps, but the federal courts have allowed her lawsuit to proceed.

As part of the most recent appropriations act for the Defense Department, Senator Al Franken attached an amendment that would, according to the official Senate site,

prohibit the use of funds for any Federal contract with Halliburton Company, KBR, Inc., any of their subsidiaries or affiliates, or any other contracting party if such contractor or a subcontractor at any tier under such contract requires that employees or independent contractors sign mandatory arbitration clauses regarding certain claims.

In other words, companies must allow rape victims to have their day in court. Pretty straightforward, and who would be against it?

A Texas senator, as it turns out.

​Gotcha!

Houston police have finally caught the gunman in a 2004 murder, hunting him all across the United States and Mexico before arresting him Tuesday in Houston.

Police say that Oscar David Zamarripa, 24, shot and killed 22-year-old Alberto Rivera a little more than five years ago at 2215 Hollister. Detectives immediately figured out that Zamarripa was probably the killer and filed murder charges and issued a warrant for his arrest.

But Zamarripa proved to be a slippery one.

Since the shooting, investigators have been following Zamarripa's moves closely. They tracked him down to south Texas, Mexico, California and Utah, but each time Zamarripa stayed one move ahead.

​
James Patton of Houston is headed to court next week, on charges that he had his way with dead female bodies.

As DA spokeswoman Donna Hawkins told KHOU about pictures found on Patton's computer: "I can tell you that the defendant's male sexual organ was seen in various poses with those of dead bodies." Other media reports mention Patton's penis being photographed near a corpse's foot.

Really? This guy pictured up above? He doesn't look creepy at all.

Unless, by "creepy," you mean "The guy who looks most likely to abuse female corpses." In that case, yeah, you've got a point -- he does look kinda creepy.

But how does he stack up with classic creepy guys?

​Harris County is seeing a big spike in domestic-violence cases this year, District Attorney Patricia Lykos' office announced today. They also announced they've taken a variety of steps to handle it.

Jane Waters, chief of the DA's Family Criminal Law Division, reported that 4,900 family violence charges were filed as of Oct. 1. "That pace of filings is 18 percent above last year, and 40 percent more than in 2007," the DAs office said. "Significant increases also have been recorded in the number of protective order applications and cases involving violations of protective orders."

Waters said the increase may be attributed in part to new initiatives and assistance programs by the DA and cops "to help make the process more sensitive to victims' needs.

"We have noticed that the comfort level of victims reporting crimes has increased, leading to additional charges and enhanced prosecutions," Waters said. "It takes courage to get law enforcement involved for the first time. If that experience is a satisfactory one, then the victim will call again and encourage friends in similar situations to get help. Enhanced reporting of crimes can save lives."

This summer we told you about two locals who had not only been accused of defrauding the federal government, but something far, far more powerful: Oprah Winfrey.

​Sisters Darlene McGruder Poole and Lashone McGruder Victor were charged in August with filing false information to FEMA in order to get rent money after already receiving houses from Oprah's Angel Network.

Today they pled guilty in a Houston federal court "to conspiring to defraud FEMA of more than $14,000 in connection with Hurricane Katrina," as the U.S. Attorney's office put it.

The two will be sentenced in January and face up to 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

The DOJ announced a similar case resulted in another guilty plea today from Angela Payne, also known as Angela McKinnies:

Payne also purchased a home on Angel Lane through the same charitable programs and she similarly submitted bogus rental receipts in order to fraudulently obtain nearly $10,000 in additional disaster assistance from FEMA. Prior to making her fraudulent submissions to FEMA, Payne received more than $16,000 in legitimate disaster assistance as a result of being displaced from New Orleans by Katrina.

​For most of the spring and summer, a souped-up squad of 100 ATF agents was running all over Houston and South Texas doing everything possible to slow the raging river of guns illegally flowing into Mexico.

Agents followed up old leads, tracked down new ones, made scores of arrests, confiscated hundreds of guns and learned a lot about how the weapons are getting from Texas stores into the arms of the merciless drug-cartel soldiers.

At a news conference today, Dewey Webb, ATF's special agent in charge of the Houston field office, said the cartels' weapons of choice are assault rifles, such as an AK-47, which are typically bought by straw-purchasers from gun shops.

Increasingly, he said, female U.S. citizens are being paid to buy the guns and then hand them over to the smugglers to carry the weapons into Mexico. The typical price paid to purchasers is $50 a gun, an attractive sum to fast-food workers and others who can make up to $500 a day by hitting up several different gun stores in a row, said Webb.

​The numbers are out on family violence in Texas and they aren't good.

According to the Texas Council on Family Violence's 2008 report, released today, 136 women were killed in the state by an intimate partner last year. The youngest was 14 (she was killed by her 15-year-old boyfriend) and the oldest was 74 (she was killed by her common-law husband).

Harris County led the state in deaths, with 29 women dying at the hands of their husband, boy/girlfriend, or ex. The local number goes up to 35 if you add Montgomery, Brazoria, and Galveston counties. That's just shy of three deaths a month. Only Dallas, Tarrant and Bexar counties also reported deaths in the double figures (15, 11, and 10 respectively).

Sally Huffer, community projects specialist with the Montrose Counseling Center says she isn't surprised by the numbers, not even Houston's number-one standing. "It could be a matter of reporting," she says. "How many times is it reported as just assault when it's really a domestic-partner assault?"

Huffer also doubts that the public will be shocked by the numbers (which were 30% higher than those of 2007). "We watch shows like Two and a Half Men, which has a running joke that one character will bring home a woman, get her drunk and then try to have sex with her. You know what? That's sexual assault. But we make if funny. We see these images over and over and it impacts us, it reduces our outrage."

​Marijuana: Always ready to live up to its cliche.

Let's take the following scenario, from Santa Fe. Dude chokes his wife, she calls the cops.

She calls the cops, apparently forgetting that her home features a nicely organized pot-growing operation, complete with a notebook documenting production.

The guy gets taken down to the station house. He is released shortly after, police tell the Galveston County Daily News, because "the reporting officer apparently forgot to sign the paperwork."

Don't come down too hard on the officer, though. He really needed some Funyuns like, right away, man. And then he got distracted by all the spooky shit on the dollar bill.

We talked to the Santa Fe police (The music while on hold: Brad Paisley's "Waiting on a Woman").

​On Thursday morning, Gwendolyn Guyton scared her husband for the last time.

She and Mitchell Johnson were arguing on the first floor of their home at 7050 Inwood when Johnson walked upstairs to get a few things in preparation to leave. It was then, police say, that Guyton decided to play the prank of a lifetime.

Guyton, 23, grabbed a loaded pistol and walked in on her husband, who was ironing his jeans. Then she fired, police say, fatally hitting Johnson, 28, in the stomach.

Guyton called the police and initially said the shooting was an accident. Later, police say, Guyton confessed to pulling the trigger, saying she had wanted to scare her husband.

Charged with murder, Guyton is currently in the Harris County jail held on a $50,000 bond.