Imagine the marketing challenge of updating a restaurant where a cult movie about a cannibalistic family was filmed. But Simon Madera and his fellow investors saw an opportunity when they bought the Grand Central Café, a Central Texas restaurant that was one of the settings for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). Embracing the building’s past, they renamed the Kingsland restaurant Hooper’s, in honor of Tobe Hooper, the late Texas filmmaker who directed the horror classic. He died in 2017. “We’re absolutely, 100% leaning into it,” Mandera said. “There’s a lot of delicate pieces that we’re adding to the place to pay homage to the movie.” Madera, who was behind the Taco Flats franchise chain in the 512 area code, joined with his wife, Hobie Sasser, and Courtney and Mike Rhodes, all from Austin, in acquiring the Grand Central Café in November. At first, Madera wasn’t familiar with the century-old Victorian-era house’s cultural heritage. In the movie, a group of teenagers falls prey to a clan of cannibals, including the notorious chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. Hooper, an Austin native, filmed some of the more gruesome scenes in the house. The house originally stood near rural Round Rock. In 1998, as Round Rock was seeing development, the structure — a pattern-book…

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw is promising to help fix a major security gap in the state’s vehicle inspection program, a gap first exposed in an exclusive report from NBC 5 Investigates. Our reporting showed how some state-licensed vehicle inspection stations are taking cash in exchange for falsely passing cars — and the state’s computer system does nothing to flag the fake inspections and prevent those cars from getting real Texas license plates. Cars that were never checked, and may be unsafe on the road. A group of Travis County law enforcement investigators told NBC 5 Investigates their own analysis of state data showed as many as five million cars on Texas roads had “clean scans” — fake inspections — where someone pays a state-licensed inspector to falsely pass an emissions test and skip the safety checks on things like the brakes and tires. Making things worse, NBC 5 Investigates discovered the state inspection computer system maintained by TCEQ captures data showing many inspections are fake but does not stop those cars from falsely passing. For weeks, NBC 5 has requested interviews with the heads of two state agencies in charge of the inspection system, the Texas…

The U.S. military is investigating the death of a soldier at a Texas Army post that in recent years has struggled with homicide, suicide and sexual assault among its troops. Fort Hood officials said Wednesday that Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz, a combat engineer who spent 15 months with the 1st Cavalry Division, died on Monday. Basaldua Ruiz, 20, who was from Long Beach, California, joined the Army in July 2021 and was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division since December that year, NBC News reported. Officials at the military installation 150 miles southwest of Dallas initially did not release further information about Basaldua Ruiz or the circumstances surrounding her death. They said in a statement that her family would be provided with support and “all releasable information.” Fort Hood then shared an update Thursday, saying the Department of the Army Criminal Investigation Division confirmed that “at this point in the investigation into the death of Pvt. Ana Basaldua Ruiz no foul play is evident, and will remain under investigation.” “Army CID will continue to conduct a thorough investigation and gather all evidence and facts to ensure they discover exactly what transpired. Information related to any possible harassment will be addressed…

Texans should get ready for an abundant, flourishing wildflower season this year. According to experts at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, wildflower season in Texas will be especially lush in 2023. “I think it’s going to be an above-average spring, particularly when it comes to bluebonnets,” says Andrea DeLong-Amaya, the center’s director of horticulture. “We had good fall rain when the seedlings were just starting to come up, and that continued through the winter.” Rainfall is not the only factor that contributes to the time that the wildflower season begins. Temperatures in Texas year-round can cause the wildflowers to bloom earlier or later. “We’ve had above normal rainfall in the fall which is good because that’s when not only bluebonnets but the other wildflowers typically germinate,” Julie Marcus, senior horticulturist at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, said. “But we’ve had such warmer temperatures, seasonally warm temperatures, that have caused them to bloom a little earlier. We are a little worried now that they are going to peak earlier than normal.” Weather maps shared by David Yeomans, KXAN meteorologist, and Wildflower Center advisory council member, indicate that January and February were significantly warmer during 2023 in Texas than…