Houston Chronicle
The two caskets lay side-by-side under a cloudless sky - hers crowned with chrysanthemums, roses and peonies, his draped with an American flag - the silence broken only by the roar of the Eastex Freeway.
Last fall, as the days grew shorter and the weather cooled, Sheetal Parwal began preparing her home for Diwali. The house was thoroughly cleaned, clutter discarded and colorful rangoli sand art laid out to welcome friends and neighbors into her home to celebrate the annual Hindu Festival of Lights with sweets, extravagant dinners and prayers to the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi.
A couple stood in quiet admiration of the vast black canvas flanking the Rothko Chapel's entrance. Staring at her feet, a woman in black sat stock-still on one of the wooden benches. "Eh," he said, as we walked back out into sticky, gray June. [...]
Any pain that Isaiah Gitchel may have felt Saturday did nothing to stop the 6-year-old who has spina bifida from holding court on his annual journey on United Airlines Flight 2432 to the North Pole. More than once, the Whispering Pines Elementary School student found himself surrounded by other children, parents and volunteers drawn to his electric personality.
Brandy Bresenhan lives and breathes trivia. The 42-year-old housewife met her husband, Brad Craig, 50, at a trivia night a little over a decade ago. When Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, flooding their Meyerland home with almost a foot of water, they were in New Orleans competing in the prestigious Trivia Finals Challenge.
The Mexican government has supplied three coffins but little in the way of closure for a pair of Houston sisters whose parents and brother were murdered, allegedly by members of a drug cartel, while visiting family south of the border.
A Houston man who allegedly shot and killed his girlfriend in 2006 is in the custody of Mexican law enforcement officials after being a fugitive for more than a decade. William Joseph Greer, 52, was arrested Tuesday after a joint operation by the U.S.
Three months after flood torrents from Hurricane Harvey submerged Buffalo Bayou Park under almost 39 feet of water, scars left by the storm are still evident. Mounds of sand still sit waist-high in some parts of the 160-acre park, branches and stripped trees still hang from the underside of bridges spanning the bayou and waterlogged plant matter still chokes tributaries that feed into Houston's central waterway.
The long stretch of land flanking Blume Road in Rosenberg could easily be mistaken as abandoned or an unused swath of the adjacent horse ranch. But behind the crooked, broken wooden fence and 6-foot-high grass sits Byrd Cemetery, the resting place of around 200 Rosenberg residents - land forgotten after years of neglect with no municipal oversight or infrastructure to maintain it.
"You ready for tonight?" a man in a faded Roger Clemens jersey asked me as we filled up at a Chevron on Saturday morning. I was wearing an old Craig Biggio T-shirt - a sure way, I thought, to make people think I was in this for real and have been for a long time.
Steve Bingham was across the street from the Whitehall Houston hotel on Friday afternoon when he was startled by a booming explosion. Bingham, a guest of the hotel, looked up and saw a plume of black smoke rising from the north facade of the downtown hotel. "I heard a booming sound.
"Dear Cancer ... " Those were the words Stacy Middleman began writing on March 28, 2014, after she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. It was her second diagnosis with the disease that claims more than 41,000 lives each year.
Abigail Sapp's Saturday mornings are usually reserved for basketball practice, but the opportunity to meet with professionals doing the work she aspires to do was tempting enough to draw her off the court. "I want to be a doctor to help people," the 12-year-old said.
More than a week after escaping her storm-ravaged home in Puerto Rico, Vera Clemente is helping provide aid to communities hit hardest by Hurricane Harvey. Clemente, the widow of Baseball Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente, was joined by former Astros outfielder Jose Cruz and team president Reid Ryan in hosting a volunteer packaging event at the Houston Food Bank on Friday.
Against a backdrop of wedding photo shoots and tourists strolling Hermann Park, Oscar Gonzalez sat in the shadow of the Sam Houston statue with pelican feathers in his hair and red ochre painted on his face, beating a steady rhythm with his drum.
Michael Spooner's house was the last one in his neighborhood above water. He watched the floodwaters on his street rise and drain away once, then twice, before letting himself think maybe his family had escaped the worst of Hurricane Harvey. "All of sudden, it was in our yard," Spooner, the worship pastor at Rollingwood Fellowship in Baytown, said.
There isn't much that motivates people to stand out in the blistering Houston summer heat. Fighting for the right to stay in the country you grew up in, though, is worth it, Carlos Portella said. Portella, 18, a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
With Hurricane Harvey - now a Category 4 storm - expected to make landfall early Saturday, residents of the Greater Houston area and further down the Gulf Coast are hunkering down and preparing for the worst.
On the brink of closure for poor academics and dwindling enrollment just three years ago, the new Jones Future Academy is now a celebrated magnet program recently named among the top 100 most challenging schools in the U.S. by the Washington Post.
It's been 40 years since 23-year-old Vietnam War veteran Joe Campos Torres' body was found washed up on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou. On May 5, 1977, Campos Torres, was arrested at a bar for disorderly conduct.
The 46-year-old native Houstonian survives with petty cash he makes from panhandling on the intersection of Weslayan and Interstate 59 and spends most of his nights sleeping on park benches. The American Civil Liberties Union released a statement Friday criticizing the twin ordinances, saying the city should focus on creating additional housing rather than "criminalizing homelessness."
Horton was one of hundreds of students searching for the perfect dress at Saturday's Blessed by the Dress event sponsored by A Dress for Barbara, a nonprofit that collects formal dresses and provides them to girls who might not be able to affordexpensive prom garb.
Gabriel, contestant No. 2 in the 2017 Houston Public Media Spelling Bee, survived to the final four in a cutthroat competition that eliminated 28 spellers in a single round. Ultimately, just two would advance to the national Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Godofredo A. Vasquez, Houston Chronicle Beneath an ash tree on the University of Houston campus, a trifold board bearing condolences sits propped up by all manner of debris-spent Starbucks gift cards, a used air horn, a key-less computer keyboard-anything a passerby had on hand to pay tribute to the White-Tailed Squirrel.
Since Strake closed, area Scouts have been using Bovay Scout Ranch in Navasota, Camp Brosig in Sealy and El Rancho Cima near Wimberley. Renderings released last week by design firm Gensler show wooden buildings with a distinct modern style - the 500 acres that will be developed will be split into a camp for weekend and residential operations for Boy Scouts and Venturers and a leadership institute.
The non-profit's app joins a handful of others, such as Mobile Justice and Cell 411, designed for people to film or upload videos involving interaction with law enforcement. Houston Police Department officials said the trend of using smart phones and social media to document exchanges has little effect on the performance of officers in the field.
Dozens of friends and members of the local Indian community gathered Sunday to pay their respects to the engineer, originally from Hyderabad and an alumnus of the University of Texas at El Paso, after he was killed in an apparently racially-motivated shooting Feb. 22. in a Kansas bar.
Two years after the bludgeoned bodies of an elderly couple were found on the floor of their Atascosita home, the search for their killer continues.
The legislation would broaden what qualifies as racial and ethnic profiling; require treatment and diversion from jail for substance abusers or people deemed to be in having a mental health crisis; and create more training and reporting requirements for county jails and law enforcement.
A coalition of faith leaders from across Houston gathered Friday at the Catholic Chancery downtown to paint a hopeful picture of immigration reform in the Trump era.
The actor died from complications related to surgery Saturday.
This August, the Gamma Upsilon chapter of Alpha Chi Omega will open its doors to around 300 women hoping to join their sisterhood, and for the first time, the sorority will officially embrace trans women as potential new members. In a video and letter released Feb.
It's not unusual for a house to go on sale in a sought after neighborhood, the home at 2330 North Braeswood Blvd. has more history than most.
As Anna Friar drove around Houston last Friday, chauffeuring her kids to school and soccer practice and running errands, her radio was silent. She didn't log on to Facebook or Twitter; she didn't check the many news apps on her phone as she often "compulsively" does.
Overlooking Houston from the 73rd floor of the J. P. Morgan Chase Tower sits the elegant, expansive office of a lawyer who went from UH Law School to counsel for one of the University's most contentious cases this year.
On the morning of Oct. 2, Colombian citizens were supposed to unanimously approve a peace agreement. It was all but guaranteed. That morning bore no indication that the referendum, which will end 50 years of conflict between the government and the rebels, would be rejected by a razor-thin margin.
Born from the momentum of Obama's reelection in 2012, UH College Democrats is a relatively new organization, but has made a significant footprint on campus and beyond. The local branch of the national organization College Democrats - not to be confused with Young Democrats - actively works with local candidates and officials on campaigns.