DMN (
I was reminded today, Oct. 8, via a letter to the editor about the two DART murders. … I would think this is an immediate topic of local interest for all DART riders, especially those taking DART to the Fair. Why would The Dallas Morning News omit this?
Judy Ruby-Brown
At about 10:15 p.m. on Sept. 29, police found a man with three gunshot wounds lying in the vestibule of a DART train. He was pronounced dead at the scene. His name was Daniel Gormley, and he was reportedly out celebrating his birthday.
A story did not appear on dallasnews.com until Oct. 3.
On the evening of Oct. 5, another DART shooting. This time, a man wearing a Jason mask sat near another rider and shot him with an AK-47. Norman Brown, 44, died at the scene.
A seven-paragraph piece ran on dallasnews.com that night, and a short follow-up came on Oct. 7.
Opinion
Two homicides in a week on Dallas DART trains. Three short articles in The News. And that coverage has raised one unsettling question: Why didn’t the DART slayings get more attention?
First, a little context: Crime coverage in The News is complicated. Incidents are initially handled by seven breaking news reporters (and their editor), who scramble to keep readers in the know about the latest noteworthy happenings among North Texas’ 8.3 million people. This may include everything from fatal accidents to a building collapse. Keeping abreast of serious crime is just one of their duties.
In reality, the newsroom must perform triage. And that means most of our crime coverage focuses on the city of Dallas.
The News tries to write about every homicide in the city, says Steve Bruss, the editor who oversees our local reporting. Ideally, we write about the crime, the victim and the court case, although reporting on each offers specific challenges: Police are tight with information; the victim’s loved ones are grieving; and court cases may take months to unspool.
“We need to be out there and be engaged with the various different sources,” Bruss says. “It’s something we’re working on.”
DART has a history of crime issues, although homicide is rare. Its officials reported that serious incidents on the system — from arson to weapons possession — leaped by 26% from 2022 to 2023 and then by 56% from 2023 to 2024. (Offenses involving drug paraphernalia drove most of those increases.) As of this summer, crime was trending down for 2025. DART police generally provide few facts about each crime, Bruss says.
“But that’s not an excuse” for us, Bruss says. “That’s just an obstacle we need to overcome.”
So, what happened with the homicides?
Lack of reporting resources is one answer. Which is to say: It was a busy news week, Bruss says, “and we didn’t have someone to devote to that story.”
News judgment was another issue. Crime on mass transit burst into the national political conversation in recent weeks after a deranged man randomly stabbed a Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte, N.C., light-rail train. Editors apparently did not consider that context.
The local killings’ unusual circumstances also should have grabbed the newsroom’s attention. For one, they, too, appeared to be random. In the Sept. 29 case, Gormley was arguing with the stranger who allegedly killed him, and in the second slaying, police say DART cameras captured the masked man as he sat near Brown and allegedly shot him. Neither victim seemed to know his assailant.
In Gormley’s case, the victim was reportedly a beloved restaurant worker who had gone to Deep Ellum to enjoy his 53rd birthday. And any murder that involves a Jason mask arguably deserves further inquiry.
Bruss rightly sees this as a teaching moment. It is an opportunity, he says, to remind our staff to work even harder to glean information directly from crime scenes, to nurture local law enforcement sources, and to build deeper relationships in the community.
“Our job as journalists is to take a set of circumstances and then apply the facts to it, right?” Bruss says. “If there is a safety problem with DART, we’re responsible to the community for pointing out that there is a safety problem on mass transit in Dallas — and then help the community find solutions to that. We need to embrace that role.”