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…

Federal environmental authorities have ordered a temporary halt in the shipment of contaminated waste from the site of a fiery train derailment earlier this month in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania state line. Region 5 administrator Debra Shore of the Environmental Protection Agency said Saturday the agency ordered Norfolk Southern to “pause” shipments from the site of the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine but vowed that removal of the material would resume “very soon.” “Everyone wants this contamination gone from the community. They don’t want the worry, and they don’t want the smell, and we owe it to the people of East Palestine to move it out of the community as quickly as possible,” Shore said. Until Friday, Shore said, the rail company had been solely responsible for the disposal of the waste and supplied Ohio environmental officials with a list of selected and utilized disposal sites. Going forward, disposal plans including locations and transportation routes for contaminated waste will be subject to EPA review and approval, she said. “EPA will ensure that all waste is disposed of in a safe and lawful manner at EPA-certified facilities to prevent further release of hazardous substances and impacts to communities,” Shore…

Attorney General Paxton has joined two Missouri-led multistate letters being sent to CVS and Walgreens concerning their decision to seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on using the mail to sell abortion pills. CVS and Walgreens recently announced their willingness to aid the Biden Administration’s radical abortion agenda by selling abortion pills via mail. The Biden Administration has attempted to twist statutes to allow the delivery, but the companies’ decision to send through the mail clashes with federal and many state laws that actually bans the distribution of abortion pill through the mail. A letter to CVS stated that “federal expressly prohibits using the mail to send or receive and drug that will be used or applied for producing production. “Although many people are unfamiliar with this statute because it has not been amended in a few decades, to text could not be clear… In December, the Biden Administration’s Office of Legal Counsel encouraged the U.S. Postal Service to disregard this plain text but the text, not the Biden Administration’s view, is what governs.” The letter also says that in addition to being illegal to send through the mail, abortion drugs are dangerous and they can be…

A powerful storm system took aim at the Gulf Coast on Tuesday, spawning a tornado that downed utility poles and power lines, overturned vehicles and ripped roofs off homes in communities east of Houston. There were no immediate reports of serious injuries. The National Weather Service had issued a tornado emergency for that area, warning that a “large, extremely dangerous and potentially deadly tornado” was on the ground Tuesday afternoon and was headed toward Baytown, about 25 miles east of Houston. The warning expired as the system moved to the east. The storm damaged commercial buildings, homes and power lines in nearby Pasadena, a city southeast of Houston. Utility poles and power lines were downed, and several vehicles, including a trailer, were damaged or flipped over in a parking lot. Footage from Houston TV stations showed several businesses suffered major damage, including the city’s animal shelter. Nearby, fences were laid over and shingles and sections of roofs were torn from homes, but there were no immediate reports of injuries. In Baytown, there were downed power lines and damage to homes and businesses, but no reports of serious injuries, said Baytown spokesperson Jason Calder. Shell Chemicals’ site in nearby Deer Park…

In the aftermath of the February 2021 winter storm that knocked out power to two-thirds of the state and killed more than 200 Texans, lawmakers and regulators vowed that the grid would not fail like that again. So, have they made good on their promise? “It depends on who you talk to, right? Gov. (Greg) Abbott said when the legislation was signed to improve grid reliability, that he felt everything that needed to be done has been done,” said senior investigative reporter Scott Friedman of KRLD’s media partner NBC 5. “However, there is still some skepticism among the experts who we talked to about whether we would have few problems or no problems if we saw a storm of the magnitude of what we had in 2021.” Following that storm, regulatory agencies like ERCOT and the Texas Public Utility Commission instituted new guidelines, including winterization standards, for power plants. Energy consultant and former advisor to the chair of the PUC Alison Silverstein said there are still elements of the grid that could be vulnerable to temperatures like the ones Texas experienced in the days before Christmas, a cold snap that was part of the much larger Winter Storm Elliott. “We don’t…

Mexican authorities on Monday raised the death toll from an attack on a state prison in Ciudad Juarez across the border from El Paso, Texas to 17, a brazen operation that appeared designed to free the leader of a local gang. Twenty-five inmates escaped in the attack. Security Secretary Rosa Icela Rodriguez said 10 of the dead were prison guards who were attacked by gunmen who arrived early Sunday in armored vehicles and fired on the entrance and inside dormitories. Rodriguez identified the inmates who escaped as being with the Mexicles gang, which she associated with the Caborca Cartel. She said the Mexicles’ leader was among the fugitives. The Mexicles have been one of Juarez’s main gangs for decades and for many years were known to work with the Sinaloa Cartel. The Caborca Cartel had been led by drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero who was recaptured in July. Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said the soldiers and state police who retook control of the prison found 10 “VIP” cells outfitted with televisions and other comforts. One even had a safe filled with cash. Authorities also found cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and marijuana inside the prison. Sandoval said two other gunmen killed…

A Los Angeles jury on Friday found rapper Tory Lanez guilty of three felonies in the 2020 shooting of hip-hop star Megan Thee Stallion that left her wounded with bullet fragments in her feet. The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for one day before convicting the 30-year-old Canadian rapper, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, having a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. The counts could lead to up to 22 years in prison. Lanez showed no visible reaction as the verdict was read. He was handcuffed while in the courtroom. Megan Thee Stallion, whose legal name is Megan Pete, testified during the trial that Lanez fired a handgun at the back of her feet and shouted for her to dance as she walked away from an SUV in which they had been riding in the Hollywood Hills in the summer of 2020. She said the two had gotten into a dispute that got especially heated when she began insulting his music. She needed surgery to remove bullet fragments from her feet. The shooting set off a storm of cultural issues and arguments that peaked…