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| This undated photo taken from the Kaufman County, Texas, website shows Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLelland. McLelland and his wife were found killed in their house, Saturday, March 30, 2013, two months after one of his assistants was gunned down near their office, authorities said. |
KAUFMAN, Texas
(AP) -- 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.
While 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 slaying Jan. 31.
McLelland,
63, is the 13th prosecutor killed in the U.S. since the National
Association of District Attorneys 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 DA'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. Anderson
said also would take precautions at his Houston office, the largest one
in Texas, which has more than 270 prosecutors.
"I think district attorneys across Texas are still in a state of shock," Anderson said Sunday.
McLelland,
elected DA 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.
In
recent years, the DA's office also prosecuted a case in which a justice
of the peace was found guilty of theft and burglary and another case in
which a man was convicted of killing his former girlfriend and her
10-year-old daughter.
McLelland said he
carried a gun everywhere, even to walk his dog around town, a bedroom
community for the Dallas area. He figured assassins were more likely to
try to attack him outside. He said he had warned all his employees to be
constantly on the alert.
"The people in my
line of work are going to have to get better at it," he said of dealing
with the danger, "because they're going to need it more in the future."
The
number of attacks on prosecutors, judges and senior law enforcement
officers in the U.S. has spiked in the past three years, according to
Glenn McGovern, an investigator with the Santa Clara County, Calif.,
district attorney's office who tracks such cases.
For
about a month after Hasse's slaying, sheriff's deputies were parked in
the district attorney's driveway, said Sam Rosander, a McLelland
neighbor.
The FBI and the Texas Rangers joined the investigation into the McLellands' deaths.
McLelland
and his wife, Cynthia, 65, were the parents of two daughters and three
sons. One son is a police officer in Dallas. The couple had moved into
the home a few years ago, Rozell said.
"Real friendly, became part of our community quickly," Rozell said. "They were a really pleasant, happy couple."
