SAN ANTONIO -- The body of a woman was found in south Bexar County on Tuesday.
Sheriff's officials said a CPS Energy employee made the discovery in the 10000 block of Fowler Road at 10 a.m.
The victim's purse was found in a nearby pickup truck that was still running.
Ike is expected to blow ashore early Saturday somewhere between Corpus Christi and Houston, and some forecasts said it could become a Category 4 storm, with winds of at least 131 mph.
Four counties south and east of Houston have announced mandatory or voluntary evacuations, and authorities are moving weak and chronically ill patients by bus to San Antonio.
South Texas is already getting ready for Ike. Some schools have called off classes through the end of the week, and medically fragile residents are getting on buses to head north.
Police said they were running a speed trap on Prue Road when Devon James, 23, came speeding by at 80 mph.
Police said that when James reached Shady Elms, he veered across traffic and into a home where a woman and her mother were sleeping.
"They were not injured, just a little shook up" said Sgt. Ramona Lopez, spokeswoman for the San Antonio Police Department. "They thought a storm was coming or something."
Police say the accused drunk driver came barreling down Prue at 80 mph. He crashed through a fence and into Blanca Trevino-Koester's home. She was awake when it happened.
"I heard this roaring noise," said Trevino-Koester. "It sounded like a tornado to me."
Of all the places to be sitting in the house, Trevino-Koester was in the bathroom.
"The impact knocked me off the commode," she said.
It probably wasn't too difficult for law officers to pinpoint who might have stolen more than $93,000 from an International Bank of Commerce branch in Castle Hills early Aug. 11.
Someone turned the security alarm off and on using a code assigned to a bank employee; $3,256 vanished from the employee's bank teller drawer; and $90,000 was gone from the bank vault (except the marked bills that can be traced after a robbery), according to federal court documents.
What's more, surveillance videotape showed two people leaving the bank at 2:05 a.m. Aug. 11 — and one was identified by the bank as a person resembling teller Andrea Nicole Clawson, 20. The heist took nine minutes.
A federal grand jury indicted Clawson on Wednesday on a charge of theft by a bank employee. The FBI arrested her Aug. 25 upon her return to San Antonio from a road trip with a childhood friend, according to a criminal complaint affidavit unsealed Wednesday.
POTEET, Texas -- A South Texas mayor already convicted of indecency with a child is the focus of a new investigation by the Texas Rangers, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Lino Donato, Poteet's mayor, is a registered sex offender who was sentenced to probation after he pleaded guilty to a child sex offense. Donato is unable to attend council meetings because they're held within 1,000 feet of where children commonly gather.
A DPS representative would not release why Donato is under investigation.
Franchesca O'Neal has filed a lawsuit against speech instructor Charles Falcon for ridiculing her in class and giving her a B when she felt she deserved an A, but the [Alamo Community College District] used statements in O'Neal's legal filing to seek the restraining order.
In the legal filing, O'Neal states she was previously in the military and "can handle a sidearm and a semi-automatic assault rifle," and that "any person of sound mind is not immune to a psychotic break and subsequent killing spree." O'Neal is seeking $300,000 in damages, but the lawsuit states, "in exchange for every penny I have asked for, I would shoot him dead and walk away penniless," and she would, "blow the back of his head out."
O'Neal told KSAT 12 News the legal claim was not a violent threat, but a "spirited discussion in the courts." She said she brought the lawsuit after Falcon allegedly made disparaging comments about her in class and said her reputation and goal of becoming a United States Supreme Court justice is now in jeopardy.
SAN ANTONIO -- Police arrested a robbery suspect in the unlikeliest of places Wednesday.
The man stole cash, lottery tickets and beer from a convenience store on West Avenue, police said.
Officers eventually located the man counting the cash he took in the robbery while swinging on a swing set in a front yard in the 1800 block of West Olmos, police said.
Police are treating this as a homicide.A man was found dead along a sidewalk on the Northeast Side Wednesday morning.
The man was found just after 7 a.m. on Tallulah near Fort Sam Houston.
"I'm not used to seeing stuff like this," said Jeanne Gutierrez.
Gutierrez told News 4 she left the neighborhood to take her daughter to school. She said the man's body wasn't there when she left, but was when she came back.
"I drove up on Tallulah, like I always do normally," explained Gutierrez. "And I saw him lying there."
The robber got away, and the couple is OK, but maybe they'll think twice about picking up hitchers in the future.A couple trying to do a good deed instead ended up helping a man commit a bad one Tuesday morning.
The couple gave a man a ride to a check cashing store in the 300 block of W.W. White Road on the East Side around 10:15 a.m. The man got out and went inside while the couple waited in the truck.
A few minutes later, the man ran out of the store. The couple, believing the man would return for a ride back with them, continued to wait in the truck. Instead, the police showed up, and the couple found out the store had been robbed.
Just before 3 p.m. on Aug. 19, a male subject committed a theft at the Canyon Lake Golf Club, located at 405 Watts Lane, in Canyon Lake.
The thief jumped into a blue golf cart parked at the club and made his escape through the golf course, with employees in hot pursuit.
The suspect may have arrived at the scene of the crime in another golf cart, which was previously stolen from the club in May. The formerly beige cart was painted black and found abandoned nearby with a flat tire.
The route taken to steal the cart was through the golf course, into the Greens of Canyon Lake and The Oaks subdivisions. The blue cart was located within the hour of the theft, in the 200 block of High Oaks Drive, in the Oaks subdivision.
After offering the Castroville city administrator’s job to the winning applicant in June — who died soon afterwards — and then restarting its search, the city council there changed gears this week, offering the post to Joe Painter, who has done the job on an interim basis since late 2006.
Painter, who in May was elected mayor of Live Oak, where he’d earlier been city manager, accepted the Castroville offer, made by a unanimous vote Monday.
Witnesses said a woman in her 70s appeared to lose control of her vehicle and crashed into the Curves fitness center in a shopping center located on Walzem Road about 11 a.m. Nobody was injured in the crash, but it did scare some of those exercising.
"She said when she pulled in, she felt like she lost control and it kept going," Curves manager Laura Donohue said. "So you know, possibly a gas pedal got stuck, brakes quit working, maybe she thought she hit the brake and she hit the gas; I really couldn't say."
Jennifer Richards' MySpace page paints a picture of a very caring mother.
The page quotes the 25-year-old mother as saying "When I am not working, I am spending time with my beautiful daughters," and "I am very blessed to have such wonderful kids in my life." Under 'children', the page reads "proud parent."
Despite her comments, Richards is accused of wanting to sell her 5-year-old daughter to an alleged child molester.
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Richards moved to San Antonio in November of 2007. She got a job as a server at the Cheesecake Factory at North Star Mall, where met [sic] and started dating Sean Block. Block is also accused of taking part in the sex plan.
In an affidavit obtained by News 4, Richards was supposed to get a car, a furnished apartment, and some money in trade for sex with her daughter. But the buyer turned out to be an F.B.I. informant.
Police are trying to determine why a man killed by a tattoo parlor owner threw a Molotov cocktail into the shop early this morning before the owner blasted him in the neck with a shotgun.
Police say Shawn Degan, the owner of Perfection Tattoos at 3507 Blanco Road, shot and killed Ricky Davis Jr. about 2:35 a.m. in front of the business.
Degan was sleeping inside his shop, police said, when he heard breaking glass at the front window. He looked outside and saw a man going to a car. The man returned with a Molotov cocktail and tossed the burning object inside the broken window.
Degan retrieved a shotgun and fired toward the suspect, police said, later identified as Davis, 29.
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Investigators familiar with the case, however, think Davis may have been motivated by a different type of jealousy. Davis, said one source, thought the tattoo shop owner was sleeping with his wife.
Degan, however, may not have been the guy Davis was looking for, and his tattoo shop may have been the wrong business.
Witnesses have told investigators that Davis was out drinking with friends when he started to talk angrily about a tattoo artist he suspected of sleeping with his wife or ex-wife. That is apparently why he drove to Perfection Tattoo at about 2 a.m., broke a window then threw the Molotov cocktail inside, sources said.
SAN ANTONIO -- A United Airlines flight bound for Washington, D.C., was delayed for nearly five hours at the San Antonio International Airport after Transportation Security Agency officials became suspicious of a passenger and a device in his luggage.
TSA officials became suspicious of a device with wires during a check about 11:15 a.m., airport spokesman David Hebert said. The device turned out to be a re-assembled MP3 player, Hebert said. A further check of the passenger brought up information TSA officials wanted to look into further, which delayed the flight, he said.
Passengers on the original plane were forced to disembark while authorities searched the airplane. After the man was cleared by the FBI and TSA, the passengers were placed on another plane and [were] scheduled to leave about 5:30 p.m. [emphasis added]
Security was able to determine that the electronics inside the man’s carry-on luggage were not explosive devices, but his checked-in luggage also drew attention, Hebert said. Several items, which Hebert did not disclose, inside in [sic] the man’s checked-in baggage were deemed suspicious.
“There was [sic] some other things (inside his luggage) they don’t want me to list,” he said.
The man was also questioned because of what authorities described as his “bizarre” travel plans.
He had just arrived in San Antonio from Dallas for a brief lay over before trying to board the direct flight to Washington D.C., Hebert said.
Police said the man, 46-year-old Anthony Sarabia, was spotted at St. Matthew's School early Monday, with a gun, knives and a baseball bat.
School hadn't started yet, but about a dozen children were at an early morning athletic practice. The children's parents called police, who had to use a taser to arrest the man.
Sarabia showed up at the 6 a.m. mass at St. Matthew's Church. No one at the church or the school had ever seen him before.
"Really, we hadn't begun our school day yet, so most of the children don't know what happened," said St. Matthew's School Principal Alvin Caro.
Police said after mass, Sarabia walked over to the baseball field where about 10 to 15 students were finishing up cross-country practice. The children's parents were the first to notice Sarabia.
