Houston News Blog

​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.

Let's do it, Gary.

​Perhaps the most famous last words spoke by a prisoner executed in the U.S. were those uttered by Utah's Gary Gilmore in 1977, the first man to be put down when capital punishment was re-instututed in 1976. His words were short, sweet, direct: "Let's do it."

But, until now, we've never known if Texas's executees were as sharp as Gilmore: TDCJ has made available the last words of folks it's helped shuffle off this mortal coil since 1982. They range from the mundane to the poetic to the absurd. See if you can tell the real ones from the red herrings. (These are excerpted from their full statements.)

1) "Ironic, isn't it? I'm a cross."

2) "As the ocean always returns to itself, love always returns to itself."

3)  "I just love everybody, and that's it."

4) "Oy vey, that's a big needle!"

5) "I'm still warm from the pepper gas."

6) "Wait -- so it turns out St. Elsewhere was just some retarded kid's fantasy? You're shitting me."

7) "If it matters to anyone, I did not kill Olga."

8) "I already gave my statement."

9)  "King Kong ain't got nothin' on me!"

10) "Let's do it, man. Lock and load. Ain't life a [expletive deleted]?"

 

**answers: 4, 6, and 9 are the fakes. As if you didn't know.   

Photo from the Tate-LaBianca Murder Blog

​Ex-Manson Family follower and stone-cold psychopathic demoness Susan Atkins died in a California prison hospital today, forty years after she helped kill actress Sharon Tate (eight months pregnant at the time) and seven other people in the notorious "Helter Skelter" murders. She had been battling brain cancer. Prison officials said her second husband was at her bedside, but Hair Balls was more interested in what her first husband, former Houstonian Donald Lee Laisure, had to say. Or maybe we should say "possible" former Houstonian.

​Earlier this week, Hair Balls wrote about an Al-Jazeera video about mentally ill people in jails, featuring the Harris County Jail and briefly profiling the police department's Crisis Intervention Response Team, which the Houston Press has written about before.

That Harris County Sheriff's Office was criticized in our post, prompting its spokesman, Alan Bernstein, to let us know about some of the things Sheriff Adrian Garcia has done, in regards to mental illness, since taking over this year. Here's what we found out:

New deputies now get 40 hours of training in crisis intervention. The state mandate since 2003, for all peace officers, is 16 hours and during the Tommy Thomas administration, the sheriff's standard was 24 hours.

"There's no court order, there's no requirement, [increasing the training] is a decision made by the sheriff's office," Bernstein tells Hair Balls.

Photo courtesy FBI

​
You've already robbed a bank and gotten away with it. You've got money to get a new t-shirt, don't you?

On the other hand, the very distinctive t-shirt you wore the first time (Apparently manufactured by "Remember Me" T-Shirts: Helping people identify bank robbers for 25 years") is, it has to be conceded, your lucky t-shirt.

So yeah, if you're going to rob another bank, damn straight you're going to break out the shirt that worked the first time.

Reporters with Al-Jazeera were in Houston earlier this month filming around the city and in the Harris County Jail -- getting some people riled up -- to "examine the criminalization of the mentally ill." The 22-minute news story was released last week, and while it was well-made and informative, the story doesn't offer much new information to anyone that follows the criminal justice system in Texas. Basically, the Harris County Jail is a bad place, especially if you're mentally ill.

But the Al-Jazeera reporters also hit on something ironic about Houston, something the Houston Press wrote about in "How to Save a Life," a cover story from December of last year. The city is home to a jail that is one of the worst places for the mentally ill in the nation, but the police department has the largest and one of the most progressive programs in the country that deals with that same population.

"We are much more professional in our response, in that we realize jail is not the answer," Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt told Al-Jazeera.

​With all the shootings that happen in Houston every week, it's easy to forget that there are lots of other ways to kill people, too. Take the car, for instance.

On Monday, Harris County Sheriff's deputies filed murder charges against Cesar Gomez for allegedly running someone over intentionally.

Investigators say that Gomez, 21, and a few friends got into a fight with 16-year-old Rubelin Castro and his buddies on September 3. When Castro and his crew began walking away, Gomez, who was driving a white Ford van, jumped a street curb, drove through the yard of a home at the corner of Duckett Park Drive and Sutton Meadows Drive and intentionally ran over Castro, authorities say.

Detectives were later able to round up the passengers in the van, who identified Gomez as the wheel-man. Gomez has not yet been arrested and is a wanted man.
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Usually the cops make the call whether to charge someone with murder, but not always. There were a couple of shootings over the weekend that will require input from the Harris County District Attorney's Office and a county grand jury to decide if criminal charges are warranted.

The first involves a Houston police officer.

On Saturday night, police got a call after 49-year-old Gary Varner allegedly pointed a gun at his neighbors on the 8000 block of Turquoise, threatened to kill them, and then ran inside his home and chased his wife and son out of the house, police say. Varner then allegedly started firing off rounds inside his own place.

When an officer got there, Varner refused to surrender and go outside, instead choosing to barricade himself in the home, police say. Varner repeatedly ran up to his door to threaten the officer, police say, and then would return into the main part of his house and fire shots. At some point the SWAT team was called out and a hostage negotiator began talking to Varner over the phone. But at about 10:40 p.m., police say, Varner walked outside his front door, a laser-guided gun in his hand, and pointed the weapon at the SWAT officers. Senior Officer R.L. Kent then fired a single shot, killing Varner, police say.


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You know what the whole Enron scandal was missing? We mean, besides the utter lack of accountability on the part of the politicians who enabled it.

It was missing songs. And dance! There was a parody musical of sorts in Houston a while back -- our wife still has the coffee mug from it -- but it didn't really take off.

Now there's a show that seems to be turning into a big hit in the London stage world, and rumors have it possibly coming to Broadway.

Enron, it's unimaginatively called, and it's directed by a guy who's done well-reviewed productions of Macbeth, Oliver! and King Lear.

Playbill's description is pretty sparse:
 

Based on real-life events and using music, dance and video, Enron explores one of the most infamous scandals in financial history, reviewing the tumultuous 1990s and casting a new light on the financial turmoil in which the world currently finds itself.

The big question: Who's playing our favorite Houstonians?

Jamie Leigh Jones

​A former Halliburton/KBR worker who claims she was gang-raped in her bedroom by co-workers in Iraq is one step closer to getting her day in court, thanks to a favorable ruling by a panel of three federal judges in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In a 2-1 ruling, the judges decided that the allegations made by Jamie Leigh Jones of Houston were not subject to the arbitration clause in her employment contract, meaning Jones' civil lawsuit against Halliburton, KBR and affiliates can proceed in court to a possible trial. The primary question before the court was whether the alleged rape and Jones' other claims were related to her employment and whether the alleged attack took place at an official workplace.

Jones started working for Halliburton/KBR as an administrative assistant in Houston in 2004. She claims that she was sexually harassed and demanded to be transferred. On July 25, 2005, she began an assignment at Camp Hope, located in the Green Zone area of Baghdad. Despite requesting to be housed in an all-female barracks, she was placed in quarters occupied predominantly by men.

A potential recipe for disaster.

​What do Oprah, the TV show 20/20, Houston crime victim advocate Andy Kahan and Houston lawyer Kim Ogg have in common? They're all involved in the sordid tale of Philippe Padieu, a Dallas-area man who is in prison for knowingly having unprotected sex with dozens of women without telling them he was HIV positive.

In May, a Collin County jury found Padieu, 53, of Frisco guilty of six counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Padieu was sentenced to 45 years in prison. The case is being heralded as a landmark in forensic science as it was reportedly the first prosecution in Texas and only the third one ever in the country to use DNA sequencing to put an HIV positive man behind bars for knowingly exposing his partners to the virus that leads to AIDS.

But the story begins more than two years ago, just before police arrested Padieu.

​If you're the owner of a Houston strip club that's slated to reopen Thursday, probably the last thing you want to see are media reports that the club may actually be controlled by an ex-Mafia boss (and alleged admitted murderer) who's in the witness-protection program.

On Monday, the New York Daily News reported that "mob rat" Vincent Palermo is the real man in charge at the Galleria-area Penthouse Club, which is planning to reopen Thursday after the City of Houston successfully sued to shut it down for a year. This was followed by the first of a two-part KPRC story on Palermo.

The city sued to shutter the club after undercover officers made a series of prostitution and drug-related arrests, city attorney Don Cheatham told Hair Balls.

"[Sexually oriented businesses] tend to produce certain types of criminal activity. In the Penthouse case, we had about ten cases of prostitution that were made in there, and about an equal number of drug cases that were made....We offered that as proof in the civil trial, and that's why we got an injunction against their operation," he said.

That injunction, Cheatham said, also stated that the property does not qualify for a sexually oriented business permit under current city ordinance.

Jeff Stoller, head of global licensing for the Penthouse Club franchise, told KPRC that the club will not be a sexually oriented business, as defined by the ordinance. But when Hair Balls tried to ask Stoller why anybody would pay strip club prices when they wouldn't get the full strip club experience, Stoller said he was no longer commenting.

​Throughout history, the term "hatchet man" has meant different things. In the 1880s, it was slang for a Chinese hired assassin. In the mid-1900s, it was used to describe a journalist who assassinated the character of a public figure.

Today in Houston, it means something much simpler: someone who assassinates a man with a hatchet. And according to the Houston police, one of them is on the loose.

On Monday morning, several workers at a business park at 5562 Gasmer were in the parking lot when they stumbled upon a dump truck. Inside the truck's cab was a dead man. Police say his face had several deep gashes and that a hatchet was found by the body. Detectives believe the dead man, who was in his 40s, was the employee of a nearby business and that the body had been in the truck for several days.

Investigators say they have not come up with a suspect or motive yet.


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Police do, however, have a pair of suspects in a killing that happened Thursday night in a home at 8303 Bell Blossom Lane. Dorian Thomas and Chelsea White are both charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Fort Bend County for the death of Darrell Anthony Mouton.


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