Tag: texas

Texas mother who blamed son’s life-threatening injuries on ‘white couple’ arrested for lying to police

A Texas mother was arrested on Saturday for allegedly making false statements to police about her two-year-old son’s life-threatening injuries sustained in February, in which he had suffered internal injuries, burns, and a lacerated liver.

Shelby Martinez, 30, was arrested on Saturday at her apartment complex where her son was injured and has been charged with making false statements to police, according to KFDX Wichita Falls.

Authorities say Martinez and the boy’s father, Thomas Gates, tried to cover up how their child received life-threatening injuries.

Their two-year-old son was allegedly run over by Gates when he was backing out with his vehicle, but the couple blamed it on an “unknown white couple,” according to police. Martinez and Gates are both black.

Gates was arrested in February, several days after the incident, for the same charge after coming clean to the police about how the incident played out.

According to authorities, Gates told them that a car driven by an unknown white female and male had pulled out of a parking spot at the Maverick on Maurine Apartments on Ridgeway and hit his son as he and his family were getting into their car.

After Martinez was questioned by police, they claimed that the details of her account were different from Gates’. Martinez was reportedly combative at the Fort Worth hospital and refused to give an interview to police.

Forensic evidence showed that Gates had lied to police about the location of where his child had been hit. Detectives found blood in the parking lot of their apartment complex, not across the street which Gates had stated, police said.

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Kenyan Immigrant, Named North Texas’s Deadliest Serial Killer, Killed in Prison

Billy Chemirmir, a 50-year-old Kenyan accused of murdering 24 elderly American women and convicted for two of the murders, has reportedly been killed by his cellmate at a prison southeast of Dallas, Texas.

The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office confirmed to WFAA that Chemirmir was found dead in his prison cell on Tuesday morning at the Coffield Unit in Tennessee Colony, which is southeast of Dallas. His cellmate was “identified as the assailant,” according to officials.

As Breitbart News has chronicled for years, Chemirmir was convicted last year for murdering 81-year-old Lu Thi Harris. Later that year, he was convicted of murdering 87-year-old Mary Brooks and had been indicted in multiple other murders.

Chemirmir stole from his elderly victims, posing as a caregiver, before selling their belongings on eBay from April 2016 to April 2018. To murder his victims, Chemirmir would smother them with a pillow, leading investigators to first assume that many of the victims had died of natural causes.

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Texas school suspends Black student more than two weeks for purportedly lengthy dreadlocks

Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu, Texas punished a Black student named Darryl George with more than two weeks of in-school suspension — for having dreadlocks.

“School officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes and violated the district’s dress code,” reported Cheyanne Mumphrey and Juan Lozano for the Associated Press. “George, 17, has been suspended since Aug. 31 at the Houston-area school. He was in tears when he was suspended Monday despite his family’s arguments that his hair does not violate the dress code, his mother Darresha George said.”

“He has to sit on a stool for eight hours in a cubicle,” the mother told the AP. “That’s very uncomfortable. Every day he’d come home, he’d say his back hurts because he has to sit on a stool.” She added that her son has grown dreadlocks for over 10 years and the family has never been harassed or received complaints about it until now.

This incident comes just as Texas enacted its own state version of the CROWN Act, a law that prohibits discrimination based on various racially-associated hairstyles like dreadlocks, braids, or Afros. The Georges pointed out the new law to school officials, but the principal and vice principal reportedly said that the law does not protect the length of hair.

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‘They’re everywhere!’ Residents complain as their Texas town of 250 people employs 50 cops

The tiny Texas town of Coffee City is taking the concept of “over-policing” to a whole new level.

Local news station CBS 19 reports that Coffee City, with a population of just under 250 people, employs 50 full-time and reserve officers – that’s one police officer for every five residents.

And these officers appear to be very busy as well, as CBS 19 has found that they issued a whopping 5,100 citations last year that generated more than $1 million in revenue for the town budget.

This has left many residents questioning why such a small town needs an overwhelming number of police officers.

“They’re everywhere, literally everywhere,” complained one woman to CBS 19 who asked not to be publicly identified.

And that’s not all.

Local news station KHOU 11 Investigates found that a surprisingly large percentage of police employed by the town had been fired from previous law enforcement jobs.

In particular, KHOU 11’s investigation found that “more than half of the department’s 50 officers had been suspended, demoted, terminated or dishonorably discharged from their previous law enforcement jobs” for actions including “excessive force, public drunkenness, untruthfulness and association with known criminals.”

Greg Fremin, a retired Houston Police Department captain who is now a lecturer at the Sam Houston State University College of Criminal Justice, tells CBS 19 that he’s “astounded” by the tiny town’s massive collection of rogue cops.

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FSC Secures Preliminary Injunction Against Unconstitutional Texas Law

Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs, a coalition of major adult platforms and creators, have been granted a preliminary injunction against the Texas antiporn law, HB1181. Texas is blocked from enforcing the law while the case is litigated.

“This is a huge and important victory against the rising tide of censorship online,” says Alison Boden, Executive Director of Free Speech Coalition. “From the beginning, we have argued that the Texas law, and those like it, are both dangerous and unconstitutional. We’re pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression. The state’s defense of the law was not based in science or technology, but ideology and politics.”

The Court agreed with FSC and our co-plaintiffs on nearly every argument:

  • The law violates First Amendment rights of creators and consumers
  • The law has a chilling effect on legally-protected speech
  • Parental filters are a less restrictive and more effective method of protecting minors
  • The state does not have the right to compel speech in the form of health warnings

HB 1181 required sites with adult content to force their visitors to provide digital IDs or other official proof of age, as well as display pseudoscientific “health” warnings. Free Speech Coalition and our co-plaintiffs argued that the requirements are unconstitutional and expose consumers to significant privacy risks.

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Texas Dept. of Health and Human Services Refuses to Answer Questions About Anti-Porn Law’s Mandatory ‘Warnings’

The Texas Department of Health and Human Services has declined to confirm or deny whether the “health warnings” mandated by the state’s recent anti-porn age verification law are supported by any official documentation or statement produced by that office.

As XBIZ reported, the Republican-authored HB 1181 was passed by the Texas legislature with bipartisan support in May and will go into effect September 1.

The new Texas age verification law — part of a state-by-state campaign by religious conservatives and anti-porn activists to outlaw all sexual material online — compels adult websites to post pseudoscientific anti-porn propaganda disclaimers declaring that “pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses and weakens brain function.”

HB 1181 is a much-augmented version of Louisiana’s age verification law and its many copycats, and echoes the debunked “porn addiction” language of faith-based anti-porn groups.

XBIZ asked the Press Office of the Texas Department of Health and Human Services if the department could provide any documentation or statement pertaining to those warnings, and clarify whether the language of the warnings has its basis in any documentation or statement produced by the Texas Department of Health and Human Services.

After requesting several days to provide a reply to the query, Press Officer Tiffany Young declined to answer, deflecting the questions with an invitation to contact “the authors of this bill for information about how it originated.”

XBIZ also contacted Texas Department of Health and Human Services Chief of Staff Kate Hendrix and the bill’s main sponsor, Rep. Matt Shaheen (R), but received no reply to the same questions.

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Texas School District Threatens to Seize 79-Year-Old Man’s Home for Stadium Parking Lot

A family in Houston, Texas, is at risk of having their generational home seized to make way for the expansion of the adjacent high school football stadium’s parking lot.

In April, the Aldine Independent School District voted to authorize the use of eminent domain to seize the home and surrounding acre of land currently owned and occupied by 79-year-old Travis Upchurch, reported the Houston Chronicle in July.

The land has been in Upchurch’s family since 1916 when his relatives first immigrated to the area from Sweden. At the time they settled there, the area was predominately agricultural, dominated by dairy farms and pecan trees.

Beginning in the 1970s, Aldine ISD started purchasing up the land around the Upchurch property as part of the construction of its current football stadium. Today, it’s surrounded on three sides by stadium parking. The vacant lot abutting the fourth side of the property is also owned by the district.

“My dad has pretty much been in a high school football stadium parking lot since then,”  Travis Upchurch’s daughter, Tara Upchurch, tells Reason.

Tara Upchurch says that she had expected Aldine ISD would want to buy the land once her father passed away. Her family’s expectation was that until then, he’d be able to stay in their longtime family home.

That expectation was upended in June when Travis Upchurch received a letter in the mail informing him that the school district was intent on purchasing his land as part of a $50 million rebuild of the existing stadium.

“It was pretty shocking,” says Tara Upchurch. “It was really hard to process the loss of it.”

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Dallas cops roar with laughter after disabled military vet urinated on himself

Four Dallas police officers are under investigation after they were caught on video laughing about a disabled military veteran who urinated on himself when he was prohibited from using a restaurant bathroom.

US Army vet Dynell Lane told the Dallas Police Department’s oversight board that two off-duty cops working security at Serious Pizza refused to let him use the bathroom around 2:15 a.m. on June 10 — despite his efforts to show them his medical paperwork documenting his medical issues, The Dallas Morning News reported.

Lane, who was disabled on deployment in the Middle East, said he called 911 but responders did not arrive before he wet himself.

“The Dallas Police Department failed me,” Lane told the board at its monthly meeting on Aug. 8.

“Two Dallas police officers discriminated against me and declined to assist me in bridging the gap between myself and the Serious Pizza manager.”

Body camera footage from one of the two off-duty cops shows two other uniformed officers arrive at the pizza joint and ask about a report of someone who “pissed themselves,” according to the paper.

“So you guys made a guy pee himself?” one of the on-duty officers says in the shocking exchange, holding her fist to her mouth as she laughs.

“Yeah,” one of the off-duty officers responds, smiling. He looks at the other off-duty officer, who appears to ask, “He called 911?”

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Texas elementary school fires black teacher after numerous racist tweets against white people go viral

A teacher at an elementary school in Texas was fired after several racist, anti-white messages on social media were picked up by conservatives and went viral.

Danielle Allen taught first grade at a Thompson Elementary School in the Mesquite Independent School District near Dallas when she posted the missives against white people on social media.

Allen referred to herself as a “black supremacist” and posted a message implying that she wanted to have her sister’s boyfriend killed because he was white.

“I promise I’ll help you hide the body. Bring all 4 of your guns,” she said in one message.

In a video she posted later, Allen then smiled as she promised to do everything in her power to break up the biracial relationship.

“Why shouldn’t I hate white people?” she said in another post.

“I enjoy being racist! I’m never changing!” read another message.

On Monday, she claimed that she had talked to school administrators about the controversy and that they had reassured her that her job was safe.

“They laughed and told me to watch what I say and I’ll be good to go! Being a great teacher pays off very well when they know your true self!” she claimed.

On Tuesday, the school posted a message saying that Allen was no longer employed at the school and was not “eligible” for rehire.

“Nevertheless, the highly offensive statements posted to her X account do not reflect the values and standards of Mesquite ISD, and the district condemns them in the strongest terms,” they added.

Allen has since deleted her social media account and has been removed from the staff directory of the school.

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Fired Southlake cop smiled for swastika photo accidentally texted to citizen, records say

One of two Southlake police officers fired last month texted a photo of the other smiling after he drew a swastika and lightning bolts, which typically represent Hitler’s paramilitary forces, according to documents obtained Wednesday by The Dallas Morning News.

The chief terminated Sgt. Jonathan Macheca and Capt. James Preston Logan last month after an investigation into the drawing, according to the documents. The records allege Macheca made the illustration on a whiteboard during a break from hiring prospective officers at a training center. Logan is accused of snapping the photo and sending it to other officers and accidentally including a member of the public, the documents say.

The documents do not include any images of the drawing. The lightning bolts are still used as a sign of white supremacy. It was unclear whether the officers had attorneys. They could not be reached for comment Wednesday evening.

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