Local and statewide law enforcement had been planning for months to raid Kevin Koonce’s compound in the woods and take him to jail. He was accused of all kinds of things, and they were ready to have him off the streets.
Koonce turned the whole plan upside down the morning it was supposed to go down by leaving home and driving down a Nacogdoches County highway. A traffic stop on a small bridge led to a shoot-out.
Mt. Pleasant is a small enough town that it only takes a few minutes for bad news to get around. On this day, the bad news was the unexpected arrival of demolition equipment outside the old train depot.
People there couldn’t understand why they weren’t told it would be reduced to rubble. As it turned out, Union Pacific admitted to dropping the ball on that. But it didn’t help people who lost memories beneath the bricks.
A maintenance worker arrived at the First United Methodist Church in Carthage one morning and discovered the ceiling in the sanctuary had collapsed onto the pews below it.
When we found one of the congregants working in the church’s front yard pumpkin patch, it was a chance to turn a spot news story into something memorable.
An overnight attempt at stealing some four-wheelers in rural East Texas proved the thief picked the wrong family to mess with.
The father confronted the man with a gun in the dark but ended up on the wrong end of the barrel after a struggle with the man who was trying to steal from him. An errant shot woke the man’s son. The next shot killed the thief and saved the dad.
People in Milford, TX woke up one morning to a massive explosion along a major gas transport pipeline. As the fire burned thanks to an almost-unlimited supply of fuel at the site of the explosion, all 700 people from Milford were forced to evacuate to a neighboring town.
As we drove from Tyler, we started seeing the plume of smoke from about 45 minutes away. The flames were visible for miles. And the stories we found amongst those people who evacuated were very much worth telling.
For weeks it seemed like it was all we heard about: Wendy Davis, a filibuster and the battle between pro-life an pro-choice. Texas’ abortion bill gained nationwide attention for what was either a shameless attack on women or a long-verdue return to moral high ground–depending on whom you asked.
We followed a group of East Texas pro-life protesters to the capital for the final day of debate on the bill.
By 10:00 that night, it was mayhem inside the capitol building. That made for one of my most interesting live shots ever.
Just days after the initial news of Trayvon Martin’s death, hundreds gathered in downtown Tyler to show their frustration with what they believed was injustice in the way the teen’s death was handled by Florida investigators. They called it a rally for all victims of injustice, regardless of race.
I’ve done more than 30 stories on the fight over TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, and met a lot of passionate people on both sides of the debate. When TransCanada made an end-run around the State Department and decided to build the domestic leg of its project separately from the border-crossing portion, it was a good chance to look back and get some perspective on more than a year’s worth of coverage.
Record-breaking drought conditions throughout Texas killed an almost unthinkable number of trees during and after the summer of 2011. This story was prompted by the fact that we were already seeing grass fires in the spring of 2012 caused by those dead trees falling over, and gives helpful information to let people know whether their trees–and homes–could be next.
