Nominees unwise to shy from immigration debate

Execution of Bardo put on hold

<b>First Posted:</b> 10/25/2008<br><br>JEFF CARLTON Associated Press Writer
PARIS, Texas &amp;mdash; In a gruesome case with powerful echoes of the dragging death of James Byrd a decade ago, a black man was killed underneath a pickup truck in East Texas and two white men have been charged with murder.

Black activists and the victim&amp;rsquo;s mother are calling last month&amp;rsquo;s killing of 24-year-old Brandon McClelland a racist attack, and investigators are looking into the possibility one of the defendants was a member of a white supremacist prison gang.
McClelland died after going with two white acquaintances on a late-night beer run across the state line to Oklahoma, investigators said. Authorities said he was run over and dragged as much as 70 feet beneath the truck. His torn-apart body was discovered along a bloodstained rural road on Sept. 16. His mother said pieces of his skull could still be found three days later.
The case has raised racial tensions in Paris, a town of 26,000 with a history of fraught relations between blacks and whites.
To some, it sounds like the Byrd case, in which a black man in the East Texas town of Jasper, about 200 miles south of Paris, was chained by the ankles to the back of a pickup truck by three white supremacists and dragged for three miles. Two of the killers are now on death row; the third is serving a life sentence.

Dragging death in Texas raises racial tensions