Dallas Police Sgt. Ira Carter takes a knee with Black Lives Matter protesters at Lake Cliff Park in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX on June 2, 2020.
Carter expressed support for the protesters but cautioned them to remain peaceful.
Unlike previous nights of aggressive policing, the protest at Lake Cliff Park bore a suppressed police presence with law enforcement surrounding the park at range.
After a simulated IED explosion eliminates an officer, police carry him from a training facility near Mansfield, TX.
Due to funding and manpower constraints, the Southwest Regional Response Group, composed of suburban police officers, was created for calls ordinarily reserved for SWAT teams, like hostage and active shooter scenarios.
Senior landfill engineer Richard Akin fields a call while treading atop a 500-foot-tall mountain of waste at the McCommas Bluff Landfill in Dallas, TX.
Akin said the landfill ingests roughly 6,000 tons of waste daily, with 500 gas wells pumping out the resultant methane which is then refined to help sate the city’s energy demands.
Because methane can ignite and smolder for years, the landfill has enough manpower on standby to cover the entire worksite with six inches of dirt within one hour, Akin said.
Michelle Chow swims at the Tom Landry Fitness Center in Dallas, TX.
Chow’s family immigrated from China during WWII and emphasized physical fitness to their children, nudging Chow toward competitive swimming.
When Chow showed an aptitude for the sport, her father, an engineer, built a swim bench so she could train on land.
Chow later qualified for Olympic trials, but her ultra-competitive spirit led her to work for Goldman Sachs.
Even so, she continued swimming, which she said gave her a sense of self, adding, “When you look at the clock, you know exactly who you are to a hundredth of a second.”
Firemen respond to a house fire on Buckalew Street in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
No injuries were reported.
NKR Defense Army soldiers pray in the Church of Mother Mary in Talish, Nagorno-Karabakh a month after the Four-Day War ended.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, long-held tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan snapped into the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
A ceasefire agreement came in 1994, but not before a million people were displaced and 30,000 died.
In April 2016, the roiling 22-year truce spilled over into the Four-Day War, leaving hundreds dead and thousands displaced with no sign of longstanding peace.
Susan Pollard wipes sweat off her brow as Brandon Pollard logs the condition of their honey bee colonies in Dallas, TX.
The couple regularly worked in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees.
Brandon Pollard said, “It’s all part of the bee-zness.”
A student fires at a clay target at the Dallas Gun Club in Lewisville, TX under the tutelage of competitive shooter Jeanie Almond.
Almond and her daughter founded Lipstick & Lead, an organization that introduced women to firearms for sport and self-defense.
According to the organization’s literature, “We strive to educate, empower and then teach the ladies how to RELOAD!”
Political supporters and detractors argue after then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump spoke at a fundraiser in Dallas, TX.
The day drew thousands, both supporting and condemning Trump’s presidential rise.
Though verbal skirmishes were aggressively civil, one photojournalist was bloodied by a thrown stone.
Teens spar at the North Lake Highlands Youth Boxing Gym in Dallas, TX.
The boxing gym opened in the crime-beleaguered Forest-Audelia neighborhood in 2017, with Dallas police officers training local children Monday through Friday.
Famed female boxer Jackie Kallen attended the gym’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, saying, “You have no idea what this is going to do for your community—boys and girls. It’s a straight road from the streets to discipline, happiness, new friendships and eating healthy. It changes your entire life.”
Captain Michael Mittman furls a jib sheet aboard the Spirit of Dallas on White Rock Lake in Dallas, TX.
Mittman and his wife, Greta Mittman, were competitive sailors and offered free boat rides on their 32-passenger, 38-foot-long catamaran.
“You’d be surprised how many people have lived here all their life and have never been on the lake,” Mr. Mittman said.
Woodrow Wilson High School cornerback Colin Spencer trains in Allen, TX.
Spencer’s football career started in sixth grade. In 2011, he won the Nike Sparq Combine in Houston, TX, outperforming 12,000 other high school athletes in a set of tests that recruiters used to evaluate football prospects.
Far from any road, a surf-battered sedan is slowly consumed by Cinnamon Shore on Mustang Island near Port Aransas, TX.
Wreckage from Hurricane Harvey still littered the Texas coast weeks after the storm abated.
Yancey Heugatter runs to man a water hose as a salvage burn goes wild near Bowie, TX.
Several acres were left charred before firefighters from neighboring communities responded to extinguish the blaze.
During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Texas Theatre in Dallas, TX failed to host its typical din of bar patrons and moviegoers.
In May 2020, Dallas was locked down to stop the coronavirus’ spread, which failed.
The theater, opened in 1931 and once owned by Howard Hughes, gained notoriety in 1963 when police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, who ran into the theater without purchasing a ticket after assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
A 77-year-old building that housed Tex-Mex restaurants for generations is demolished for a CVS pharmacy in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
Despite public outcry, the area saw sweeping gentrification with predominately Hispanic families on the cusp of being priced out of their own neighborhood.
Demarcus Corbins phones a fare while a factory worker sleeps after his night shift at a Sterlite plastic factory in Ennis, TX.
Corbins worked with his father, Curtis Corbins, who started the nonprofit Southern Dallas Link. With shortfalls in public transit, Southern Dallas Link shuttled South Dallas residents to livable-wage-paying jobs, which were rare in the neighborhood.
A 115-year-old house is cleaved for relocation in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX.
When a developer threatened to demolish the 1905 home, architect Alicia Quintans hired McMillan House Movers and Miller & Sons Construction to preserve the home, merging it half a mile away.
Jose De La Rocha of the Dallas Police Department’s Underwater Recovery Team trains in the Lewisville Fire Department scuba pool.
Composed mostly of police officers with rigorous rescue diver certification, they trained in blackout masks to simulate area waters’ near-zero-visibility conditions.
The team once attempted to recover evidence from a 1983 murder in a small Dallas pond. Dive-team commander Jack Bragg recalled, “In that little pond, we found six or eight motorcycles and motorcycle parts, a safe and several weapons including assault rifles and a handgun. None, by the way, were what we were looking for.”
A cow cools off in a depleted water tank at the Seven Bar Ranch in Archer County, TX.
The county had not received substantial rainfall for a full year.
Rancher Abbey Abernathy said his cattle had to walk six miles to graze and six more to drink. “They’re literally walking themselves to death,” he said.
The drought led some multi-generational ranchers to sell off their emaciated livestock and quit ranching entirely.
While an excavator’s bucket crashes through a roof, a demolition worker hoses down the dust of a mid-century modern building that once housed Joyce Florist in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX.
Owners demolished the 1950s building, which they said was difficult to maintain, in favor of erecting a 6,000-square-foot florist and conference center.
A Lake Highlands High School student kicks back during the school’s 50th anniversary celebration in Dallas, TX.
Piñatero Alex Santos and his assistant, Jesús Barradas, shape and refine piñatas at ABC Party in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
Like Barradas, Santos was once an assistant and learned his craft by observing the shop’s previous piñatero, who was denied reentry to the United States after visiting his ill mother in Mexico.
Santos then asked to fill the position. The shop’s owner, Elvie De La Fuente, said Santos’ piñatas were terrible at first, but that he learned quickly.
Former Dallas City Council member and Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill covers his face during an exclusive post-trial interview in Dallas, TX.
In 2009, Hill was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for bribery, having been found guilty of coercing developers to pay for favorable votes in what became the city’s largest public corruption case.
Years later, the same attorney who prosecuted Hill filed for his early release after Hill was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer.
On May 12, 2017, Hill was freed from federal prison. He died the following day.
In a TV interview, Former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk asked that Hill be remembered beyond his criminality, saying, “At his core, he was a very kind and decent man.”
A man straddles the corner of a parking garage as an estimated 50,000 political protesters march toward the Texas State Capitol in Austin, TX on January 20, 2016, the day Donald Trump was inaugurated President of the United States.
Similar protests were held across the country.
Muslims gather at the Ivy Apartments for Friday prayers in the Vickery Meadow neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
Vickery Meadow’s sprawling apartment complexes were once a stronghold for up-and-coming Dallas singles, but the neighborhood later became the de facto resettlement location for Dallas’ refugee populations, whose nationalities shifted according to conflicts abroad.
Recent years saw an influx of Iraqi, Afghan, Sudanese, Myanmarese and Syrian refugees.
Because the neighborhood had no mosque, a place of worship was improvised using the apartment’s storage room.
Mecca-facing worshippers regularly spilled into the parking lot.
A girl attempts to snag bills in the money booth at White Rock Skate’s last hoorah in the Lake Highlands neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
Built in 1973, White Rock Skate became a local institution for generations of fun-loving, rollerskating children and adults, but its doors shuttered in 2016 when longtime owner Chuck Connor Jr. retired.
Connor succumbed to cancer two years later.
First Responders salute the body of Dallas Police Sgt. Michael Joseph Smith on Interstate 635 in Dallas, TX.
Sgt. Smith was killed when a sniper, Micah Johnson, fired on police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas in 2016.
Johnson, a U.S. Army veteran, shot 12 officers, killing five, and was later killed by a DPD robot carrying an explosive.
Smith, a U.S. Army veteran, had served with the DPD for 27 years and was survived by a wife and two daughters.
Elijah Day, owner of Oak Cliff Paint and Hardware, wades through his inventory in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, TX.
After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, Day followed his then-sweetheart to Dallas.
In 1974, he took a job at Oak Cliff Paint and Hardware—established in the 1930s—and in 1991 he outright bought the place.
“Mr. Eli,” as he was called, gained local notoriety for repairing all manner of small engines, even when repairs were nearly as expensive as replacing a unit entirely.
Day said, “It’s a real good feeling when you can take an old broken-down thing and make it run.”
He sold the shop and retired in 2016.
Fred Christen works in the woodshop at CC Young Senior Living center in Dallas, TX.
Christen, a frugal 89-year-old, helped organize the Woodies, a collective of senior woodworkers who, in addition to making hand-crafted goods, repaired residents’ furniture.
A child peers from the backseat of a souped up 1960 Chevy Parkwood Wagon as it tears down the drag strip at Northstar Dragway in Denton, TX during a wake for racer Blake Williams.
In December 2016, Williams was killed in a fiery crash at Yello Belly Drag Strip in Grand Prairie, TX after his Thunderbird was clipped by a Mustang at the end of a race.
Williams’ wife and two children witnessed the accident.
At Williams’ wake, fellow racers performed burnouts, whereby a vehicle remains stationary while its wheels spin, causing the rubber to heat and smoke before the vehicle barrels forward.
Alexander Sukhu is showered with flower petals on his birthday at the North Texas Hindu Mandir in Dallas, TX.
Since the North Texas Hindu Mandir was the only place of worship of its kind in the region, some congregants regularly drove three hours to attend services.