Slain D.A. in Texas armed at all times

KAUFMAN, Texas – Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland took no chances after one of his assistant prosecutors was gunned down two months ago. McLelland said he carried a gun everywhere he went and was extra careful when answering the door at his home.

“I’m ahead of everybody else because, basically, I’m a soldier,” the 23-year Army veteran said in an interview less than two weeks ago.

On Saturday, he and his wife were found shot to death in their rural home just outside the town of Forney, about 20 miles from Dallas.

Although investigators gave no motive for the killings, Forney Mayor Darren Rozell said: “It appears this was not a random act.

“Everybody’s a little on edge and a little shocked,” he said.

The slayings came less than two weeks after Colorado’s prison chief was shot to death at his front door, apparently by an ex-convict, and a couple of months after Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse was killed in a parking lot a block from his courthouse office. No arrests have been made in Hasse’s Jan. 31 slaying.

McLelland, 63, is the 13th prosecutor killed in the U.S. since the National District Attorneys Association began keeping count in the 1960s.

Sheriff David Byrnes would not give details Sunday of how the killings unfolded and said there was nothing to indicate for certain whether the D.A.’s slaying was connected to Hasse’s.

El Paso County, Colo., sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Joe Roybal said investigators had found no evidence so far connecting the Texas killings to the Colorado case, but added, “We’re examining all possibilities.”

Colorado’s corrections director, Tom Clements, was killed March 19 when he answered the doorbell at his home outside Colorado Springs. Evan Spencer Ebel, a white supremacist and former Colorado inmate suspected of shooting Clements, died in a shootout with Texas deputies two days later about 100 miles from Kaufman.

McLelland himself, in an Associated Press interview shortly after the Colorado slaying, raised the possibility that Hasse was gunned down by a white supremacist gang.

The weekend slayings raised concerns for prosecutors across Texas, and some were taking extra security precautions. Byrnes said security would be increased at the courthouse in Kaufman but declined to say if or how other prosecutors in McLelland’s office would be protected.

Harris County District Attorney Mike Anderson said he accepted the sheriff’s offer of 24-hour security for him and his family after learning about the slayings, mostly over concerns for his family’s safety.

“I think district attorneys across Texas are still in a state of shock,” Anderson said Sunday.

McLelland, elected D.A. in 2010, said his office had prosecuted several cases against racist gangs, who have a strong presence around Kaufman County, a mostly rural area dotted with subdivisions, with a population of about 104,000.

“We put some real dents in the Aryan Brotherhood around here in the past year,” he said.