This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.
This week, in news from Dallas-Fort Worth: protests; the Lemon on Stemmons; deaths at both the Dallas and Tarrant County jails; the firestorm surrounding a teen’s death in Frisco; a roundup of area election news; the latest on water plans and how locals can put their $0.02 in; more trouble in Irving around the Sands deal; a big step forward for Oak Cliff’s deck park; the Dallas connection of the Camerlengo, a major Catholic official who’s highly visible in the wake of the recent death of the Pope; movie and book news; and the ladies of Dallas get their bonnets on for the Arboretum. And more!
This week’s post was brought to you by the music of Kraftwerk, who I am going to see tonight and will have already seen by the time you read this post.
We have a grab bag, so let’s dive right in:
- On April 19, we had a second mass day of protests in the Metroplex against the Trump administration’s policies. The DMN has the story of a number of the local protests after missing the last round completely; the Star-Telegram and the Fort Worth Report have the protests in Fort Worth. There was also a separate protest on April 15 against the detainment of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia grad student whose jailing by ICE kicked off the current round of imprisonment of pro-Palestinian protestors and cancellations of student visas.
- It looks like the city is going to sell “the Lemon on Stemmons”, the permitting building that was purchased without due diligence that turned out to be uninhabitable by employees. Per the DMN, the city didn’t have a proper process in place for acquiring the building and property investments of that size, so the City Manager is going to have to work on that. Meanwhile, the Stemmons building is for sale. More details from local real estate site Candy’s Dirt.
- Speaking of building purchases, Dallas city council has also approved buying the old DMN building as part of the revitalization of the area around the Kay Bailey Hutchison convention center. The vote was 13-2, with Mayor Eric Johnson one of the holdouts. I hope they have a better plan for how to use this building in place.
- And on the subject of Mayor Johnson and being on the downside of things, the DMN has an analysis of how partisanship will affect the May council elections. Council elections are officially nonpartisan but after the mayor’s change of parties, this year’s elections has seen both Republicans and Democrats express more interest in and put more effort toward the council elections with Republicans making sure as many seats as possible were contested. Republican gadfly Allen West is currently the chair of the Dallas County GOP; we’ll have to see if his strategies go anywhere. (If he thinks his candidate in D10, my council district, is a good candidate, he’s got a different idea of what good looks like than I do.) DMN political analyst Gromer Jeffers contributed to this report. It’s worth your time.
- The DMN got five minutes to talk to new Dallas Police Chief Daniel Comeaux.
- DMN editorial columnist Robert Wilonsky would like to ask Ken Paxton why, exactly, do you need to bring a gun to a concert? in response to his lawsuit to allow guns at Fair Park and the Majestic Theatre, where I am seeing that Kraftwerk concert tonight. I’m with Wilonsky, especially since the Majestic sells booze during these shows.
- I mentioned the tragic death of Austin Metcalf at a UIL track meet in Frisco recently. That story continues across local front pages, not least because the suspect in the stabbing is a Black teen, Karmelo Anthony, and Metcalf was white. Both families have been harassed and Metcalf’s family members have been swatted twice. Meanwhile, an out-of-state organization called Protect White Americans rallied in the parking lot of the stadium where Metcalf died. The leader of the protest called Metcalf’s father, who, to his credit, told the protestors that he didn’t condone what they were doing. Local journalist Steven Monacelli covered the protest (Bluesky, also warning: photos of racist signs). The DMN’s editorial board thinks everybody is behaving badly (except maybe Austin Metcalf’s father, for telling off the white supremacists) and social media is to blame. I can’t say that but I have seen a lot of talk about it on the Dallas and Texas subreddits, with speculation about how the incident between the two youths started and why Anthony was in the wrong place and had a weapon in the first place. It’s an ugly and sad story; the DMN is right about that.
- There was also a shooting last week at Wilmer-Hutchins High School in which four students were wounded after the shooter, another seventeen-year-old, was let in with his gun through an unsecured door. Students returned to school on Tuesday, a week after this shooting, which follows a previous shooting in which a student was wounded in 2024. The shooter is in the Dallas County jail, waiting for trial.
- Back in March, an inmate named Andra Adkins died at the Dallas County Jail. The medical examiner’s office failed to perform an autopsy on the grounds that the inmate apparently died by suicide. The inmate also had a number of serious medical conditions. His death is being investigated by (sigh) the Tarrant County Sherriff’s Office, so at least someone is looking into it, as required by state law.
- There has also been another death at the Tarrant County Jail: a 57-year-old woman with multiple health conditions. The Star-Telegram story is concise but not particularly informative; KERA has more and more context, including the reminder that this is the 71st death of an inmate in jail custody since Sherriff Bill Waybourn took office in 2017; the DMN story falls between the other two. This is the third death at the Tarrant County Jail this year. No cause of death has been released in any of the deaths.
- On the subject of Chasity Bonner, who died last May in the Tarrant County Jail, we have some changing of stories about video evidence requested by the family and the press. The late release of the video is one of a long line of delays that Bonner’s family says is an attempt to wait out the deadline for a wrongful death suit.
- It’s also been a year since Anthony Johnson Jr’s death in the Tarrant County jail and no trial date has been set for the two jailers accused of killing him. The civil trial is also in limbo.
- Bolts Magazine also has a story about the Tarrant County Jail and all the deaths and investigations. Since 2021, more than two dozen people have died in the jail without the legally required investigations into their deaths following on. The whole article repeats a lot of things I’ve talked about here and draws it together very well. This one is also worth your time.
- Moving on to election-related news: early voting has started and Dallas County is confident in its new pollbook software, the software that checks in voters. After the pollbook software failed in some precincts in the November election, the software was decertified and replaced by new pollbooks from KNOWiNK. KNOWiNK isn’t a new vendor; their pollbooks are used in 29 states and checked in about a quarter of the voters in last November’s election.
- Frisco’s bond propositions for its new arts center are the hot topic in its election.
- KERA asks who Families for Irving, the PAC behind city council candidates, is. The answer seems to be they’re an astroturf Republican group but KERA doesn’t tell us who’s funding them. That’s what I want to know.
- The Mansfield mayoral race, which is nominally nonpartisan, features a nonpartisan incumbent and a challenger who’s rallying with Bo French, Allen West, and the True Texas Project. These nominally nonpartisan races in the Metroplex are all turning partisan over time.
- Local blogger Mark Steger reports on the League of Women Voters candidate forum for Richardson City Council.
- Meanwhile, Richardson first-day early voters had a ballot error that won’t affect the outcome of the vote: the four races that were omitted had only one incumbent candidate each.
- 2026 watch: Rep. Jasmine Crockett raised $1.68 million in the first quarter of 2025. Not putting up with any crap pays off big.
- The latest on the Marvin Nichols Reservoir planned to supply east Texas water to the Metroplex: East Texas has asked the Texas Water Development Board to declare the reservoir an interregional conflict and solve it.
- Meanwhile, our north Texas 2026 water plan, covering the next 50 years, is open for public comment. Click through to find out about public meetings and how to comment online or by mail.
- The Irving-Sands business dealings over the new resort the Sands folks want just got messier: an Irving resident has accused the Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce of making a backroom deal with the Las Vegas Sands Corp. to sell the Sands the old Texas Stadium site. The resident has filed a pre-suit discovery petition to gather evidence. The Sands deal is also a major factor in the Irving city council elections mentioned above; the DMN story at the link has context for the accusations.
- Ken Paxton’s latest harassment of the EPIC City developers demands records of any contacts Plano ISD has had with the mosque. Nobody knows what he’s talking about.
- Earlier this week a Denton County Commissioner and her husband were attacked by their 23-year-old grandson. She survived and was hospitalized; her husband was killed. The DMN has details of this tragedy and tributes to the commissioner, who is expected to survive, and her late husband.
- Denton County put a faith-based nonprofit in charge of its homeless shelter and they’re not living up to their contract with the county. The county is also bad at dealing with homeless encampments.
- On Earth Day, the city officially renamed the deck park over I-35 in Oak Cliff, near the Dallas Zoo. Halperin Park also got its first trees. This is an attempt to build the equivalent of Klyde Warren Park in Oak Cliff; the big question is whether the Zoo can anchor the park and provide regular parkgoers the way the Arts District does for Klyde Warren.
- This week I learned that Amber alerts were originally suggested by a Fort Worth woman. Like most of us, Diana Simone now thinks Amber Alerts need reform to make them useful again.
- North Texas had Weather over the weekend: nine possible tornadoes west of Fort Worth on Saturday night, five of which have been confirmed. In east Dallas, where I live, the thunder this week has been strong enough to rock my pier-and-beam 1960s home, which is a lot more impressive when the piers are made of brick than it is for piers made of wood.
- The Camerlengo, a senior catholic official who acts as interim pope and prepares the papal conclave for the election of the new pope, is Cardinal Kevin Farrell, formerly the Bishop of Dallas. He was in Dallas from 2007 until he was called to the Vatican in 2016, where he served in a number of offices and advanced to the position of Camerlengo in 2019.
- The Dallas International Film Festival starts this weekend and Texas Monthly has the scoop. It’s now an Oscar-qualifying festival, which has meant a lot more interest in exhibiting. In other local film news, our reputation as a movie town got us an advance screening of the new Marvel movie, Thunderbolts.
- In other film-adjacent news, Texas Christian University plans to give Taylor Sheridan an honorary doctorate. Sheridan has been filming Landsman, based on a Texas Monthly podcast, in Fort Worth recently.
- This week I learned that Melinda French Gates grew up in Dallas and graduated from Ursuline Academy. She was interviewed by D Magazine as part of the publicity for her new memoir.
- Last, but not least, if you admire the crazy hats British women wear to Ascot, you’ll love the Dallas version: The Mad Hatter’s Luncheon at the Dallas Arboretum. The photos of the fundraiser are unsurprisingly over-the-top.