Randall Patterson

Tyjanae Moore: Mayor's Office Makes Clear Transgendered Woman Should Not Have Been Arrested For Using Women's Bathroom

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA Concerning Tyjanae Morre, the transgendered woman whose attempt to use a women's restroom in the downtown library got her tossed into the men's jail, and briefly threw city government into confusion, Mayor…

Remembering Julia Briggs: Teen's Project To Help Children Of Homicide Victims Lives On

This almost sounds like a movie: Hair Balls has learned that within the Houston Police Department's homicide division, there's a detective Brian Harris who unwinds from the work of his day by coaching a girls lacrosse team. On this team (the Iron…

Tyjanae Moore: Houston Still Struggling With Transgender/Bathroom Issues

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA Two weeks after a transgendered woman tried to use the restroom in a city building, she and the city seem still to be recovering. A security guard at the downtown municipal library told police it was a man…

Floyd Bernard Payne: Stealing An ATM Is Easier When The Storeowner Doesn't Turn On The Security Camera

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA There is breaking and entering, and then, as Humble police say happened last week, there is backing your truck through the wall of a convenience store after hours, attaching chains to the ATM and -- whee! --…

Raw Materials Issues Blamed for Shortage of Lethal Injection Drugs

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA Sodium thiopental, the drug that the state of Texas so desperately needs for its executions, is approved by the FDA for use only as an anesthetic. On the market for more than 70 years, it has been largely…

Shot Down: Lethal Injection Drug Shortage May Require Change to Execution Protocol

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA The Austin American-Statesman reports that there's a national shortage of drugs for lethal injection. The shortage apparently began when the country's sole dealer of sodium thiopental, Hospira, decided earlier…

Jail Misery

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA On the last day of July, months after quitting his job as a cook on an offshore oil rig, Monte Killian was tooling around the Fourth Ward in his pickup when, police say, they pulled him over and found a rock of…

Jail Hell

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA Twice this summer, on mornings in June and August, I stood at the corner of Commerce and San Jacinto as the inmates came shuffling out of the Harris County Jail, tired and dirty, squinting into the light. There…

A Child's Word

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA When the victim showed up at the door, on a fall morning in 2006, nearly everyone wanted to help her. She was 14 years old and told the guidance counselor at the Ninth Grade Center in Pearland that "she just…

A Digital Bathroom Wall for Pat Lykos

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA The new Harris County district attorney won election on promises of reform, and immediately afterward, snapped her staff to attention. Seven assistant DAs were promptly fired. The others, some 250 of them, were…

The Murderers' Defender

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA In the 179th Criminal Court, in the courtroom of Judge Michael Wilkinson, it had become a matter of record that a Continental Airlines manager, picking up his two-year-old son from day care last January,…

A Deadly Twist at Houston's Crime Lab

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA After the death of Baldev Sharma, his widow, trying to get used to living alone, shoved all of his pictures away in drawers. A year later, Perveem Sharma pulled them out again. Now here they were, laid out on…

Two Sworn, Gun-Toting Peace Officers Protect the County's Animals

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA A recent Monday found the animal cruelty investigator again behind the wheel of the big, white Chevrolet fitted out like a tank. Beside Lieutenant Mark L. Timmers were a tranquilizer rifle and a 12-gauge…

Joe Harris County spends his days in court, keeping score on the trials he watches

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA The courtrooms on the 20th floor of the Harris County Criminal Justice Center are larger than others in the building, and so, in an effort to accommodate spectators, the more sensational cases are usually tried…

To Catch a Rapist

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA Corey Williams comes home from work after midnight, tired usually, and sometimes thinking about the joy he used to feel "knocking people over." As a powerful defensive end, he certainly didn't mind the violence…

A Montrose Man's Panic Room Wasn't Enough

Facebook Twitter email Print Article AA The criminal heart of the city, wherever it lies, does not probably lie in Montrose. Those who live there do not expect violence, and last January, when police reported an "Incident at 1320 W. Pierce," a lot of…

Students of Virginity

There was a time when not having sex consumed a very small part of Janie Fredell’s life, but that, of course, was back in Colorado Springs. It seemed to Fredell that almost no one had sex in Colorado Springs. Her hometown was extremely conservative,…

Not in Their Back Yard

The land in question is a high, rolling hillside, where California’s Central Valley slopes into the Sierra foothills. Many have been drawn here, and after the first stampede, for gold in 1849, most left disappointed. Then the land lay virtually empty…

Russ Whitney Wants You to Be Rich

Among the promises made after midnight to people who want to believe them, amid ads for the cream that will make you look young again and the “motionless exercise” system that will melt away your fat comes the voice from the television that asks,…

For Sale by Owners

the land had been in Roges Brown’s family since 1882, all of 23 acres on the South Carolina coast, reverted now to oaks, magnolias, Spanish moss. Brown had played there as a child more than a half-century before. He had cleared the brush, gardened,…