2023 June Oak Cliff Advocate

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june 23

contents

OAK CLIFF ADVOCATE VOL. 17 NO. 6

PROFILE

4 Team captain

DINING

14 NOLA Snoballs

FEATURES

8 Parks

22 Elmwood Farms

COVER 18 Runaway laws

BACKSTORY

27 Rosemont

Elementary

Gardening

equipment is laid out on a table at Elmwood Farms. Read more on page 22. Photo by Victoria Gomez.

A SPARKLING SENIOR

The first male captain of the Sunset Bisonettes has taken his final bow

Story by EMMA RUBY

Stepping under the Friday Night Lights is a rite of passage for high school-aged boys across Texas. But when Diego Aguilar looks back at his years on the football field, he won’t think of touchdown passes or shoulder pads.

Instead, he will remember the sparkly purple, silver and white of the Sunset Bisonette uniforms, the rustle of

foil poms and the crowd’s roar as the squad hit uniform high kicks and slid into splits.

Aguilar graduated from Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in May after spending his senior year clad in white and silver — the colors reserved for the captain of the Bisonettes.

He is the first male in program history to hold the title.

Diego Aguilar leaps into a split during a football game halftime performance.

Photo courtesy of the Bisonettes.

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Aguilar began dancing in seventh grade, after a school counselor accidentally assigned him to a dance class elective.

He was a shy, quiet kid, but dance came naturally to him.

“It allowed me to express myself in a way I couldn’t do while speaking. I was really good at it, and I was happy to be good at something that wasn’t just academic,” Aguilar says.

He met Leah Huggins, the director of the Bisonettes, later that school year when she taught a master class for the young dancers.

She says that from the beginning, Aguilar carried himself like a dancer.

“I noticed his professionalism, his ability to learn new material quickly, and his love for dance was obvious even though he was brand new,” Huggins says. “When he danced, you couldn’t tell he was a shy person.”

When it came time for high school, Aguilar was torn between Booker T. Washington’s dance program — which he says he never expected to be accepted into — and Sunset High School, where he could dance drill team under Huggins.

Aguilar decided to attend Booker T. but was told by Huggins that if he could balance both, he would be allowed to join the Bisonettes.

Aguilar knew he wanted to be captain as soon as he joined the team as a freshman, despite the fact that a boy had never had the honor before. Up until 10 years ago, it was rare to see a boy on a drill team squad at all, he says.

“It was nerve-wracking to break that stereotype that girls do drill team and boys do football,” Aguilar says. “I wanted to break that barrier to inspire other male dancers that they can be captain, they can be in drill team.”

Aguilar was named team lieutenant his second year.

It was the first time he broke a barrier for the team, becoming the first sophomore to be given a leadership position under Huggins’ tenure.

Aguilar continued to be a team leader his junior year, but Huggins says during those first two years,

Aguilar had to learn how to break out of his shell and become a leader.

“He’s not the screaming-in-yourface, loud, yelling type. Everyone has a different way that they lead, and he’s a little quiet, but I know the girls respect him, and he doesn’t have to yell because they are already listening to him,” Huggins says.

And as a senior, Aguilar led the long line of Bisonettes onto the football field every Friday at halftime like a shimmering silver and white mother duck.

Aguilar isn’t done with dance even though his drill team career has concluded.

In the fall, he will attend the University of Oklahoma and study modern dance performance. He says he wants to be a professional dancer before eventually becoming a drill team director himself.

The close of his senior year has been bittersweet and hectic, he says.

“I felt like I was everywhere at once,” he says of his first semester, where he juggled college applications, football games, the start of competition season and his senior showcase for Booker T.

Aguilar says “every moment” of the last four years has been important to him, but his favorite memory from his time as a Bisonette is the “surreal” night he became captain.

A beloved team tradition, the dancers for the upcoming year’s team circle around the candidates for the leadership positions. The outgoing lieutenants and captain hand off their batons to the new appointees, signaling the changing of the guard.

Aguilar says on the night he became captain, he stood in the middle of the circle with his eyes squeezed shut.

His pounding heartbeat thundered in his ears, he says, drowning out the team drumroll.

“All I could hear was screaming. I didn’t want to look. But when I did, I saw white and silver,” Aguilar says. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I actually made it. I accomplished the goal I set for myself when I was 13.’”

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Dallas is poised to majorly invest in parks, and Oak Cliff is ahead of the curve

Story by EMMA RUBY | Illustrations by LAUREN ALLEN

“I BELIEVE THAT PARKS, trails, playgrounds and recreation centers are critical infrastructure in a modern city,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said in his State of the City address in November 2022. “When I was growing up in Dallas, families like mine depended on our city parks.”

In the address, Johnson urged city leaders to focus on the “Three P’s” — public safety, potholes and parks — in a billion-dollar bond package that will go before voters next year. A bond committee with an appointee from each

city council district will develop and negotiate the final spending plans, but a parks-specific task force will focus on the parks section of the bond.

Recently, the Dallas Park and Recreation Board created a list of all the parks needs that could be included in the package.

The list totals $662 million.

JR Huerta sits on the park and recreation board for District 1 and will be the district’s representative for the task force.

He estimates roughly $333 million, half of the

hood as an Oak Cliff and West Dallas native, made a similar promise in his address. When discussing elaborate plans for a trail system that will connect much of the city north of I-30, Johnson said he also plans to bring that “long-overdue infrastructure” to Oak Cliff.

“I promise you that we will not leave this part of the city where I grew up behind,” Johnson said .

THE BOOM

The billion-dollar bond package comes only 14 years after 2009, when a budget deficit caused the city to slash parks funding down to the bare bones.

Across the country, cities are experiencing a parks renaissance.

Many people credit the pandemic with encouraging people to take advantage of parks and return to the outdoors. But Huerta says people have “been at parks this whole time,” especially in Oak Cliff.

District 1 ranks second out of the city council districts for access to parks, Huerta says. After all, parks are in our neighborhood’s history. In the 1920s, George Kessler — the namesake for the Kessler Park neigborhood — worked on Fair

Park beautification and developed a plan to contain the Dallas floodway. Around that same time, philanthropist Martin Weiss donated land to the city, hoping to see public facilities and parks bloom in his neighborhood.

“People feel like it’s always North Dallas that gets improvements, but we have such beautiful parks in Oak Cliff that it’s hard for us to keep saying that we don’t have access to them,” Huerta says.

And plans for even more parks and green spaces are booming.

Late last year, city council member Chad West proposed Westmoreland Park as the site for Dallas’s next skatepark. It could be the first update Westmoreland Park has received since 2012 and a major step in increasing skatepark infrastructure in Dallas.

Currently, Dallas has only one completed skatepark. Compare that to San Antonio’s 16, Houston’s eight and Fort Worth’s four, and it is clear we have fallen behind.

Since the skatepark plans were first introduced, parks department members and West have said they intend to target the 2024 bond for some of the funding needed.

Kevin W. Sloan Park, which will replace the Jefferson/12th Street connector, is set to begin construction this year. Plans for the park were started under council member Scott Griggs, who preceded West, and it is named after the landscape architect who designed the park before his death in 2021.

Huerta says plans for the Sloan Park are currently out to bid, and a construction company could be selected as soon as this summer.

Sloan Park, which has been in talks among neighbors for more than 10 years, is an example of how things “bubble up” in the parks department.

“I thought I knew everything about parks and how they operate, and I know a lot of it,” Huerta says. “But now that I’m on the inside, I can see that sometimes things bubble up. And I think the community doesn’t understand that things bubble up, there’s a lot of red tape to go through.”

The red tape is why Huerta sometimes recommends pursuing public-private partnerships on parks projects. As someone who has worked on both the private and city side of the parks department, he says he “knows how to help the public get things done” faster than the city is often able to.

For some reason, Huerta says, people can be put off by the idea of a public-private partnership.

But he points to Klyde Warren Park downtown, which is heralded as a crown jewel for the city and is now being replicated in other cities and in Oak Cliff across I-35, as an example of exactly how a public-private partnership can work.

BRIDGING I-35

When the Texas Department of Transportation began thinking about reconstructing I-35E in 2017, community meetings were held to discuss the opportunity to build a deck park with the same basic infrastructure as Klyde Warren Park.

TxDOT and The Southern Gateway Foundation say the Southern Gateway Deck Park is an opportunity to “right the wrong” that happened 50 years ago, when I-35 was built through the historically Black neighborhoods in Oak Cliff.

“One woman said to me, ‘If we get this right, this will not be turf. This will be common ground to all the young people of our neighborhood,’”

says Chuck McDaniel, managing principal at the landscaping architecture firm SWA that has helped design the new deck park. “They’ll come here, it’s bright and shiny and new, it’s as good as anything they have anywhere else in Dallas, and this will represent common ground.”

McDaniel and Ryan Blaylock, a principal at the HKS firm and SWA’s collaborator on the park’s design, say including elements of Oak Cliff culture into the park were essential to telling the “deeper story” of the park.

In the 1950s, a prominent street in the neighborhood that was ravaged by I-35E was 12th Street.

Once the park is finished, a 16-foot-wide pedestrian footpath called the “12th Street Promenade” will mark where the street once stood. It will be paved by stones engraved with the names of famous or pivotal Oak Cliff residents

throughout history.

Vegetation local to Oak Cliff will be planted throughout the park, and in the children’s play areas, the ground will be decorated with the imagery of leaves of local trees.

The deck portion of the first phase of the park, which spans from Ewing Avenue to Lancaster Avenue, has already been completed, and construction is expected to begin this summer. According to the Southern Gateway Foundation, the park could be open to the public by the end of 2024.

“What this will do for the community in and around (the park) is probably the biggest thing,” Blaylock says. “It’s going to allow people areas where they can go and get access to Wi-Fi that they may not have access to at home. Other areas around the park and other developments will flourish.”

But for some neighbors, the idea of flourishing development spurred by the deck park is worrisome.

In a March press conference, residents of the 10th Street Historic District — the historically Black neighborhood that originated as a Freedman’s town and was hemorrhaged from

Oak Cliff during the development of I-35E — voiced their concerns about the deck park.

“We keep hearing that they’re trying to stitch communities together, but what communities are they talking about?” asked resident Patricia Cox. “Money for the park is not money for Black history.”

Tenth Street residents have said they are worried development spurred by the deck park will be the final nail in their already struggling neighborhood’s coffin.

The Southern Gateway Foundation has held community meetings to field feedback from neighbors who may have questions or concerns about the park, but distrust still persists among some residents — especially those old enough to remember the days they could walk down to Zang Boulevard without braving the highway underpass.

A 10-MINUTE WALK

Over a quarter of Dallas residents are unable to walk to a park in less than 10 minutes.

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It’s an improvement from 2014 numbers, which saw half of Dallas residents living further than 10 minutes from a park or greenspace. But still, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land would like to see that number shrink even further.

Trust for Public Land called on 300 mayors to pledge to increase walkable park or greenspace options for their residents in 2017, and Dallas Mayor

Mike Rawlings was the fifth mayor in the country to join the campaign.

Since then, Mayor Johnson has recommitted to the pledge.

“Dallas has had the good fortune of having two back-to-back mayors who really cared about parks,” says Robert Kent, the Texas State Director of TPL.

“You pair that with coming out of COVID, when basically the whole world was like, ‘Where do you go? You go to the park.’

That year, year and a half, when we were really in the thick of it, every single day people were walking to the park.”

Huerta believes in the vision of the 10-minute walk pledge.

In District 1, he says two major hot zones persist near the Hampton and Clarendon neighborhood and Zang and Jefferson area. The parks department is in the process of buying land for a pocket park, but positioning the park in a way that children will not have to cross the busy Hampton Road is a priority, he says.

“The parks department is taking that into a factor. Even if a park is sitting just across the highway from you, can a child really cross the highway to get there?” Huerta says.

But while District 1 is a model for the 10-minute walk pledge in Dallas, the Southern parts of Oak Cliff need help. According to Trust for Public Land, 46% of residents in the Five Mile Creek Watershed still can not walk to a park.

Plans for 16.7 miles of trails and 125 acres of park land could help fix that.

Adopted by the city in 2019, plans for the Five Mile Creek Greenbelt are being spearheaded by Trust for Public Land. The original plans for the widespread trail system were devised in the ’50s.

Kent says the organization is “picking up on an 80-year promise.”

The trail is planned to connect with Chalk Hill Trail on the west side, and The LOOP trail on the east, to create a Dallas-wide network of trail systems.

Known as the 1954 Bartholomew Plan, the Dallas Parks director at the time, L.B. Houston, said the trail could be “comparable to certain sections of Turtle Creek Parkway,” which now connects 86 acres of parks and playgrounds.

TPL has purchased 125 acres of land for three parks across the planned greenbelt.

Kent calls the parks “emeralds on a string.”

The first park, Renaissance Park, was completed in 2021 after the principal of South Oak Cliff High School approached Kent about an empty plot of land adjacent to the school.

TPL partnered with the urban planning nonprofit Better Block to develop the space, which features Wi-Fi and an outdoor classroom, a basketball court, a rain garden, climbing walls and gym equipment.

And, on the north end, the park opens out onto the paved Cedar Crest Trail, which will link to the greenbelt, once completed.

The trail is planned to be completed in eight sections, and Renaissance Park connects to the third section. The first section of the trail will be 2.41 miles and connect Westmoreland Park to Kiest Park.

It is “shovel ready,” Kent says, once funding is sorted out and finalized.

The biggest challenge facing parks is funding, Kent says. TPL is looking into state and federal funding, as well as private fundraising and grants to fund the trail.

The Dallas bond package could also be a help.

Dallas currently spends $115 per resident on its parks a year, Kent says. He would be willing to pay “double that.” Kent points to Plano, where $225 a resident is spent on parks, as a city that is “doing it right” when it comes to prioritizing parks and green spaces.

“We are willing to spend $115 bucks on a lot of stuff that provides a lot less value. Parks are the steal of a century,” Kent says. “Imagine what would happen if we thought of our parks as being as important as our hospitals for public health.”

ethic, professionalism and outright desire

SNOBALL SEASON

With a variety of flavors, toppings and fillings, the possibilities at NOLA Snoballs are endless

Story by EMMA RUBY

Photography by KATHY TRAN

MARDI GRAS BEADS GLIMMER as they dangle from the tree branches that shade over the service window at NOLA Snoballs.

Maureen Ehrlicher sits at that window during the summer days — and other times of year, if the weather is above 70ish degrees or if someone asks nicely — ready to serve up the summer treat of her hometown.

Ehrlicher moved to Dallas 33 years ago for her husband’s work. They moved to Winnetka Heights because — like a true New Orleanian — the only thing he really required in a home was a “usable front porch.”

While Ehrlicher had a career in sales and “a bunch of other things,” and was a substitute teacher for the first few years of her retirement, she found herself “looking for something to do” four years ago.

NOLA Snoballs was the obvious endeavor.

“I wanted to have my own business, and I just love snoballs,” Ehrlicher says. Snoballs were made famous by New Orleans shops just like Ehrlicher’s. But while the sticky, syrupy paper cups topped in rainbow ice may look similar to a snow cone, any New Orleanian would balk at the suggestion that the two are the same.

The difference, Ehrlicher says, is in the ice.

“It’s shaved ice, not that crunchy, yucky snow cone ice,” Ehrlicher says. “It’s made from a Southern Snow Machine from New Orleans.”

The Southern Snow Machine is a staple of any legit snoball shop, she says. For each snoball, soft ice falls from the whirring machine and Ehrlicher uses a plastic cone to shape the signature dome shape.

Ehrlicher makes her own simple syrups with real sugar and gets flavored concentrates delivered from shops in New Orleans as well as Oklahoma.

Tiger’s blood, strawberry, blue coconut and piña colada are the most popular flavors, she says.

Customers have the option of adding toppings to their snoballs ranging from condensed milk to chopped pickles, and cream flavors are made with evaporated milk. Ice cream or cheesecake stuffings further distinguish the indulgent snoball from a snow cone.

Ehrlicher’s authentic snoballs have attracted New Orleans transplants who stop by to get a taste of home and, oftentimes, become regulars at the shop.

But in other ways, Ehrlicher has adjusted her menu to reflect the community her shop is in, offering

Maureen Ehrlicher waves to passersby from the window of NOLA Snoballs.

Syrups at NOLA Snoballs are homemade by Ehrlicher and come in all colors and flavors.

toppings you would “not normally ever” see in a New Orleans shop.

“When I got (to Jefferson Boulevard), there was this large Hispanic population, and they would ask for things like Tajín and chamoy, so I started adding it,” Ehrlicher says. “It keeps people coming back, and I try to do what the people want.”

The shop is a straightforward operation: Ehrlicher looks out over Jefferson Boulevard, ready to take an order, with some New Orleansthemed artwork decorating the walls, and snoball equipment filling nearly every corner of the small space.

While her niece or nephew sometimes drop by the shop to help out, Ehrlicher says it mostly sustains itself, and she almost always holds down the fort solo.

“It’s not much of a show,” Ehrlicher says. “But I run it.”

In the fall, NOLA Snoballs sets up shop at the Texas Discovery Gardens during the State Fair of Texas. Those few weeks pay the shop’s rent through the winter, she says.

The shop is closed during that time, but any other time the weather is above 70 degrees, Ehrlicher will be waiting at her window.

She opens at 2 p.m. and closes at 7 p.m., but if she gets a call from someone on the way, she has no problem staying open a few extra minutes to provide them with a sweet treat.

The shop is a labor of love, one she says she will do for as long as she keeps finding joy in it.

“I call it a hobby, but my daughter always says ‘no, it’s not a hobby, it’s a business.’ And it is a business, but I enjoy it,” Ehrlicher says.

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Flowers, photos and other tokens left by loved ones mark the grave of Venus Rodriguez.

the crime of running away

SURFACE-LEVEL INVESTIGATING & LIMITED ANSWERS — THE PRICE MINORS PAY

Story by EMMA RUBY | Photography by KATHY TRAN

TWO DAYS BEFORE HER 16TH BIRTHDAY, VENUS RODRIGUEZ TOLD HER FAMILY SHE WAS GOING TO TAKE A SHOWER BEFORE DINNER.

She locked the bathroom door, turned on the shower and climbed out the bathroom window, slipping away into the early evening.

Venus’ family say they reported her missing to police the moment they realized she was gone.

Over the next four months, Venus’ family members found themselves frustrated as they attempted to navigate the Dallas police runaway system.

When Dallas police did locate Venus, it was too late.

Her bullet-riddled body had been left in a creek near the Wynnewood North neighborhood, only three miles from her home.

A STATUS OFFENSE

Venus’ uncle and legal guardian, Victor Arredondo, says efforts by Dallas police to locate Venus did not match his family’s desperation to have her back home.

“They looked more into her case after they found her body than they did when she actually ran away,” Arredondo says.

As homicide detectives began looking into Venus’ death, they discovered she had been living with the 22-year-old man who has been charged with her murder. Neighbors told investigators they witnessed the man, Arturo Flores, chasing Venus down

the street and striking her.

But if Venus had ever feared for her life or wanted to call for help, she would have known that calling the police would have led to consequences for herself, too.

Texas is one of only nine states that criminalizes minors running away.

The state considers running away a status offense — meaning it is only considered illegal when committed by someone 16 years old or younger.

And Venus had run away once before, in 2020.

Venus was only a middle school student when she went to a home in Cedar Hill to stay with a friend who Arredondo says had a negative influence on Venus.

That was the family’s first time dealing with a runaway investigation. Family members had location-tracking access to Venus’ phone and knew where she was, and alerted police to her location.

But Arredondo was upset to learn that without a warrant, police were unable to enter the home to look for Venus unless they were let in by the homeowner.

“They told us they couldn’t do much about it, but we knew she was there,” Arredondo says.

After Venus was found, she spent six months at the Letot Center — a Dallas juvenile facility that provides residential intake for youths who are runaways and works with family members for an amicable home reunion — where she received therapy and counseling.

“She was doing good in there. She’d gotten back on track doing school, and we

were told she would help out with the other kids,” Arredondo says. “She got to the level where she could come home on weekends for a few hours, and we would have to drop her back off by 7 p.m.”

Arredondo attended family counseling with Venus at the center. When she was allowed to return home, he enrolled her in classes at Molina High School. In addition to school, Venus attended counseling sessions and parole check-ins. Her runaway attempt was now on her record.

At that point, Arredondo says Venus’ personality had returned to “how it was before.”

“She knew what the consequences would be if she ran away again,” he says.

It made Venus’ second disappearance all the more devastating.

A SCARLET LETTER

Jason Vallejo is the founder and executive director of Elevate North Texas, an emergency shelter for 18- to 24-yearolds who are in crisis or experiencing homelessness.

Vallejo says that in 2022, 35% of Elevate residents have a minor infraction on their criminal record — such as running away or being found with a small amount of marijuana — that had become a “scarlet letter” when they attempted to rejoin society.

“It kind of starts that cycle, right? Then moving forward, they can’t find stable housing or even employment because they have this minor thing that’s on their record now,” Vallejo says. “It makes it harder for

them to get those resources that they need in order to become self-sufficient and grow up to be contributing adults.”

Vallejo says teens who run away from home are often fleeing dangerous situations. Familial abuse, or a family kicking out a teen for circumstances such as pregnancy or identifying as a member of the LGBT community, are the most common reasons minors give for leaving home.

But Arredondo says that wasn’t the case for Venus.

Venus’ home was full of love and laughter, her family says. She spent her afternoons helping her younger siblings with their homework and often bought them treats. Venus’ aunt, Priscilla Hernandez, describes the family as being “very close knit.”

And Arredondo says it was important to him and his mother, Minerva, that their home had boundaries for the kids.

“Here, you had to be home by 9 p.m. for school the next day,” Arredondo says. “My mom wouldn’t let (Venus) wear makeup. She was a kid.”

But while Venus’ initial return home had been a return to normal for the family, she soon began texting Arturo Flores.

Arredondo isn’t sure how Venus and Flores met, but he was immediately concerned when he learned that Flores was six years older than Venus.

“She met the wrong person,” Arredondo says.

But at 15 years old, Venus was infatuated with Flores. She likely thought it was her first brush with love.

The second time Venus ran away, she went to Flores’ home. Family members say they began hearing from friends and community members who would see Venus out with Flores, or walking in his neighborhood.

Venus’ family say they emphasized to Dallas police detectives that Venus was only a minor, and they believed she was being taken advantage of by an older man.

Minerva says she gave detectives Flores’ name and phone number. She expected police to use that information to follow up on the rumors that Venus was living with

Flores, but she was frustrated when they never did.

“The cops would say, ‘We can’t go to every house you tell us you think she is at,’” Arredondo says. “It was frustrating. We would get no answers other than, ‘We’re looking into it.’”

The Dallas Police Department told the Advocate that detectives were never provided a direct address of where the family believed Venus to be.

“We do not get into specifics regarding investigative tactics, but we can say detectives conduct interviews, follow leads they are given and also work with local shelters, hospitals and juvenile facilities to work to locate missing persons,” the statement says.

On Jan. 16, Venus’ grandmother Minerva received a call from detectives asking if the family had heard from Venus.

Venus’ older sister, Anne Marie, had received text messages from Venus sporadically throughout the four months she was gone. But the texts stopped Jan. 6.

It was frustrating. We would get no answers other than, ‘We’re looking into it.’

Family

members of Venus Rodriguez walk together while wearing shirts memorializing their loved one.

“I asked how she was and said that I missed her,” Anne Marie says. “I thought maybe she didn’t want to talk to me because she was scared I would tell our grandma.”

The next evening, two detectives knocked on the family’s door.

“They just asked, ‘Does Venus Rodriguez live here?’” Arredondo says. “I said I was her guardian, and they asked to come in and talk. I thought they probably had her in custody or something. They asked the kids to go to the other room and sat us down, and they started asking us questions like when did she run away, and when did we last see her?”

Police continued questioning Arredondo and his mother for the next 30 minutes, he says, before delivering the tragic news.

Venus’ body had been found in a creek. She had been shot multiple times and was “clearly murdered,” a police report says. Officers told the family they were able

to identify Venus through her finger prints, which were in the system from her booking after running away in 2020.

A STAGGERING CASELOAD

Arredondo says his family has spent the first half of 2023 juggling their grief with their anger that Venus’ case could have been handled differently by Dallas police.

He says that between her two runaway cases, there are a string of police failures and a lack of accountability for the adults who enabled his niece to run away in the first place.

In both cases, the homeowners of the homes Venus stayed at have not been charged with harboring a minor. Harboring a minor is a Class A misdemeanor in Texas, punishable by up to a year in prison and a maximum $4,000 fine.

Arredondo says he would also like to see laws change so that police are better able to investigate leads on children who run away and enter homes where minors

are believed to be staying. And he would like to see the Dallas Police Department allocate more resources to cases like Venus’ and families like his.

According to the department, there are “more than a dozen” detectives assigned to the Youth Operations department and certain detectives within that unit handle missing persons and runaway cases.

The department declined to clarify how many detectives specifically handle runaway cases, saying, “We don’t give exact staffing numbers for safety/security reasons.”

But there are a staggering number of cases to handle.

As of May 2, 592 runaway minors had been reported to Dallas police. That averages out to 4.8 new cases a day.

Police had a four-month period between Venus leaving home and her body being found, but Arredondo says his family has received few answers about how police conducted their investigation during that time.

A public records request filed by the Advocate to attempt to see that investigation was denied due to a minor being involved.

Arturo Flores has been charged with the murder of Venus Rodriguez. He was indicted by a grand jury April 13 and is being held in the Dallas County Jail on a $500,000 bond.

Flores is also being held on two $1,000 bonds for charges of unlawfully carrying a weapon and interfering with public duties.

Arredondo says he is disappointed Flores has not been charged with statutory rape, kidnapping, harboring a minor or assault. Dallas police declined to clarify why additional charges have not been given in Flores’ case, and a request for comment from Flores’ lawyer was not answered.

For Venus’ mother, who is also named Minerva, it has been the hardest year of her life. Minerva does not live in the home Venus did, but lives nearby and is a present figure in her family’s life.

She says Venus would often come visit her and called her daily.

Venus should be in school playing her trumpet, helping her siblings with their homework and preparing for summer vacation. She should be getting a driver’s license and a summer job.

“They should’ve just done a better job of bringing her back home,” Minerva says

GROWING CONNECTIONS

ELMWOOD FARMS IS CULTIVATING CROPS AND COMMUNITY

Story by EMMA RUBY | Photography by VICTORIA GOMEZ

LIKE MANY THINGS, heirloom tomatoes struggle to grow in the Texas heat.

Which is a shame, Eric Nystrom says, because they are “bred for flavor” and revered in the culinary world.

So Nystrom, alongside Andrew Cagle and the three other board members of Elmwood Farms, decided to celebrate the urban farm’s first birthday with a tomato-growing experiment.

Elmwood Farms is nearly an acre of land that sits on the corner of South Polk Street and Nolte Drive. Run by a small but dedicated group of friends who describe themselves as “farming nerds” and “soil enthusiasts,” it’s a space for cultivating both crops and community.

And for finding creative ways to grow new and exciting produce.

After reading about a seed company called Row 7, Cagle bought a pack of seeds for a new tomato called the midnight roma. Located in Portland, Row 7 cross-pollinates popular produce to create new varieties of vegetables that are flavorful and adapted for climate.

But the climate of Portland is nothing like that of Texas, so Elmwood Farms is taking it a step further with their first midnight roma crop. Once the tomatoes are ready, they will harvest the fruit and replant the seeds of the plants that grew the most successfully through the Texas summer.

In theory, they will breed a drought- and heat-resistant heirloom-adjacent tomato variety that will be “viable” for the Texas climate while still “celebrating what makes an heirloom tomato great.”

The idea for an urban farm in Elmwood was originally Cagle’s.

An Oak Cliff resident since 2019, he’s a cinematographer by trade but discovered a passion for gardening after buying a home and planting in his backyard.

“My gardening energy was overflowing from the containment of our yard, and so I was always looking around. I’d see a bare patch of grass, and my mind kind of started, you know, creating these invisible ideas of what can be there,” Cagle says.

On an afternoon walk with a friend, Cagle pointed at a patch of land near downtown Elmwood. It was only an eighth of an acre, but already, Cagle could see the potential for an urban farm.

The friend he was walking with, Doug Klembara, was immediately in on the idea. He brought in

On the second Saturday of every month, Elmwood Farms hosts open volunteer days for neighbors and community members.

Nystrom, who was an “easy sell” due to his passion for (and graduate education in) soil science. Two other Elmwood residents, Collin Martin and Matt Glenn, were brought in to joining the farm’s leadership team as well.

But after several years, the farm outgrew the space. (And their landlord kindly suggested they leave.) For a moment, it seemed Elmwood Farms would be no more.

“We want to be like a hub, a community, and a place for people to gather and know the land and their neighbor. So that was what we lamented that we didn’t have any more even if we could continue growing at our houses,” Nystrom says.

That’s when a friend showed Cagle the vacant plot of land across the street from Tyler Station. It was a major size upgrade, but

they knew Elmwood Farms had to continue.

And so, just over a year ago, Elmwood Farms 2.0 was created.

In the last year, the urban farmers have planted sunflowers and zinnias, basil and cowpeas, okra and lentils.

This summer will be the first “harvestable crop” for Elmwood Farms. Barley that will eventually

Cagle says he will likely encourage volunteers to harvest and take home the cowpeas, and small

be used by Oak Cliff Brewing Co. stands tall near the entrance of the farm.

Elmwood Farms is nearly a full acre of land across the street from Tyler Station.

pop-up sales of the okra and lentils may be a weekend occurrence.

Flower stems will be sold once the sunflowers and zinnias bloom, and as for the midnight roma tomatoes, Nystrom and Cagle are already thinking about recipes.

The farm has hosted ticketed meals cooked by local chefs, monthly volunteer days, a music festival and DJ performances.

The farm is a nonprofit, and those ticketed events — along with a sponsorship from Methodist Dallas Medical Center — help the men keep the farm running “month to month,” Cagle says. Most urban farms are nonprofits, he says, because the economics of farming are inherently disadvantageous for small-scale projects.

“But that’s OK. I think that the value that a space like this offers is that it’s offered to the public,” Cagle says.

The farm hosts volunteer days the second Saturday of every month, but Nystrom says he is happy to give the gate code to “anyone who wants” to regularly take advantage of the neighborhood green space.

When Nystrom describes the experience of farming the soil of Elmwood alongside his friends while educating and feeding his community, he sounds like a man driven by a mission that leaves him spiritually nourished.

“We’re not just brains in a jar. We’re minds, we’re bodies and hearts and spirits,” Nystrom says. “Slowing down together and breaking bread together and all of those more intangibles, that’s what [Elmwood Farms] is about. Farming is a vehicle for connection.”

To put it less philosophically, working the farm has “been a blast.”

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Andrew Cagle (left) and Eric Nystrom (right) are two of the founding members of Elmwood Farms.

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By EMMA RUBY

A centennial celebration

Rosemont Elementary rings in 100 years

Established in 1922, Rosemont Elementary has been a steady force of education for thousands of Oak Cliff children during the past 100 years. In May, the Rosemont PTA celebrated the school’s centennial anniversary.

Amy Tawil, a kindergarten teacher at Rosemont, was one of many volunteers who helped collect information, anecdotes and photos from throughout Rosemont’s history for the celebration.

Tawil describes Rosemont as a “very traditional school” that has held steady throughout its history, even as the neighborhood surrounding it became more populated and the demographics of Oak Cliff have changed.

“Through all that, I’ll tell you, the reason Rosemont is what it is today is the parent and community involvement,” Tawil says. “It’s bigger than just at the school, it’s a community out in the neighborhood.”

In 2011, Rosemont revived the school’s Dad’s Club. The club has become infamous around Oak Cliff, developing the annual Dash for the Beads event and hosting community get-togethers. But Tawil says she recently learned the school actually had a Dad’s Club as early as the 1940s.

Beth Whitaker, who attended Rosemont from 1965 until 1972, says she “so cherishes” her memories from her time as a student, especially those of the annual father/daughter dance.

“[My dad] always bought me a corsage, you know the whole thing. It was so cute. I have pictures of me year after year and the different dresses that I wore alongside him,” Whitaker says.

Whitaker says her memories from her time as a Rosemont student are not too different from those a student today would likely have.

Her first field trip was to a symphony to see Peter and the Wolf . After school, students would often visit a nearby shop called More Store to buy penny candy.

Whitaker says she also remembers partaking in shelter-in-place drills as concerns about the Cold War mounted throughout her time as a student.

Shortly after Whitaker left Rosemont, the school underwent major renovations.

Rosemont was designed by the same architect and built by the same construction company as Booker T. Washington High School, Tawil says, and originally the schools shared a similar red brick, classic facade.

But in the ’70s, the Oak Cliff community became “really involved in energy conservation,” Tawil says, and decided to stucco the school and remove many of the windows. Around that time, the school also transitioned into an open classroom model, “which is horrible,” Tawil says.

In the open classroom model, classroom walls were knocked down and the school shared large communal spaces. Tawil says

that because all of the classrooms overlapped, it was likely very loud and difficult to ensure focus.

The school reinstalled classroom walls in the early ’80s, Tawil says, but the stucco remained.

“We’ve always kind of been sorry that it doesn’t look like it did back then,” Whitaker says.

Tawil has been in charge of collecting Rosemont artifacts in the months leading up to the centennial celebration. She says finding relatives of the inaugural students has been like finding treasure.

Melinda Watts attended Rosemont as a seventh grader in 1963, but her mother was a student when the school first opened. She graduated in 1927, and Watts says when she was cleaning out her mother’s house shortly after her death, she found an old Rosemont yearbook in the attic.

In the yearbook, classmates affectionately referred to Watts’ mother as “baby face” in their notes to her. Photos in the book showed her mother alongside classmates in flapper dresses, leaning against a playground slide.

Watts donated the book to the Rosemont PTA to display during the centennial.

“This has been a fun thing for us to kind of rally around, and it’s made me pull out old pictures. I still live in the Rosemont district, I am still very connected to it,” Whitaker says.

Seventh grade girls perform an operretta in the Rosemont auditorium in the 1960s. Photo courtesy of the Rosemont PTA.