Whoever shot Texas District Attorney Mike McClelland and his wife Cynthia wanted to make sure they were dead.
According to NBC News, McClelland was shot at 20 times. It is unclear whether or not he was hit with that number of bullets. The reports did note that they recovered shell casings from a weapon using .223 caliber ammunition, which just happens to be the same type of ammunition used in AR-15 assault-style weapons. While it's not unique to AR-15s, the number of bullets shot at McClelland could indicate that such a rapid-fire weapon was used.
A Texas district attorney was shot at 20 times and his wife, Cynthia, was shot once when they were gunned down in their home on Saturday, a federal source with knowledge of the investigation told NBC News.
The source didn't say exactly how many times the man was hit. An earlier affidavit in the case said both of the victims sustained multiple gunshot wounds. The reason for the discrepancy was unclear.
The slayings of Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland and his wife have rocked the the small town of Kaufman on the eastern outskirts of Dallas.
The brazen attack on the justice official comes weeks after Colorado's prison director, Tom Clements, was shot to death at his home, with a paroled white supremacist ex-con killed in a Texas shootout the main suspect.
The Star-Telegram has published the full affidavit (PDF), which includes requests for a cell phone records dump for the period beginning January 1, 2013 and ending March 31, 2013.
Even though police are not making public statements connecting white supremacist gang prosecutions with the assassination of Assistant DA Haase and DA McClellan, the federal prosecutor in charge of the Texas racketeering case pending against the Aryan Brotherhood has withdrawn, citing security concerns.
Over at AlterNet, a chilling reminder that our prison system has something to do with turning out cold-blooded killers who ache to wage war on their own countrymen:
The prisoner, a black man who said he got on the Aryan Brotherhood’s good side after assisting them with a legal request, says that law enforcement should know about the danger of the prison gang because “it’s something they should have been aware of for decades,” he writes.
“If these recent killings represent the Brotherhood’s twisted form of retribution, the fact that it has taken so long to begin is all the more chilling. To me this would demonstrate a hard-nosed determination that all citizens should find frightening,” the prisoner said in the Daily Beast. “America’s harsh judicial system, coupled with a growing national affinity for utilizing complete isolation at super-max prisons as a corrections tactic of first choice, in many cases turns men into monsters.”
The prisoner warned that “many of the first men locked up when our nation embarked on a policy of for-profit mass incarceration near the end of the last century are now returning into society.” He also provided details on what motivates the members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang.
"They were still mentally fighting the Civil War (like so many other whites) and traced their roots back to men like Confederate guerrilla William Clarke Quantrill, whose Quantrill’s Raiders sacked the pro-abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas, at the beginning of the Civil War," the prisoner wrote.
While the perspective of the man writing the letter might be shaped by his own incarceration, the prison system in place today undeniably serves profits more efficiently than society. If what he says is true, it could only be the beginning.
