*Authorities said he was run over and dragged as far 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.*

By  JEFF CARLTON

PARIS, Texas (AP) — 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's mother are

calling last month's killing of 24-year-old Brandon McClelland a racist

attack. But prosecutors cast strong doubt on that Friday.

McClelland

died after going with two white friends on a late-night beer run across

the state line to Oklahoma, investigators said. Authorities said he was

run over and dragged as far 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 sounded 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 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.

Prosecutors in the McClelland

case said they are looking into whether one of the defendants, Shannon

Keith Finley, was in a white supremacist gang while in prison for

killing a friend.

But they said they have seen no evidence so far

that McClelland's slaying was racially motivated. And they noted the

three men had been friends for years.

"This is a group of guys

who had black friends and white friends," said Allan Hubbard, a

spokesman for the Lamar County district attorney's office. He added:

"Any comparison to Jasper and James Byrd is preposterous."

Autopsy

results are expected back next week. While investigators don't believe

McClelland was tied to the truck, they planned to look closely for

marks on the body that would indicate precisely how he was dragged.

Community

activist Brenda Cherry said authorities have not seriously considered

the possibility this was a hate crime. "There's a problem in Paris,

Texas," she said. "I don't see a difference in getting dragged behind a

truck and getting dragged under a truck."

A flier advertising a

Saturday memorial service for McClelland said he was "the victim of a

brutal and racist hate crime." The New Black Panthers met with

investigators and held a news conference at the courthouse promising to

examine the killing.

"I truly feel that race played a part in

it," said the victim's mother, Jacquline McClelland. "It is a racist

town, and Paris has always been a racist town."

The city is

perhaps best known for its 70-foot Eiffel Tower replica topped by a

giant red cowboy hat. Paris, which is 73 percent white and 22 percent

black, was in the news last year after a black girl was sentenced to up

to seven years in a juvenile prison hundreds of miles from her home for

shoving a teacher's aide at school, while a white girl was sentenced by

the same judge to probation for burning down her parents' house.

At

the town square, decorated with pumpkins and hay bales for Halloween,

the mother of the black girl said Friday that she began to feel Paris

was a racist town after moving there from Oklahoma.

"There's a certain amount of fear that is pressed into black people when they live in Paris," said Creola Cotton.

According

to court papers, Finley and Charles Ryan Crostley, both 27, told police

they left the dry town to get beer in Oklahoma, and on the way back,

the three men, all apparently drunk, argued about who was sober enough

to drive. McClelland, an unmarried maintenance worker, decided to walk

home, taking some beer with him, the men told police.

But

Finley's estranged wife and one of his friends said they had been told

by the two defendants that Finley began to bump McClelland with the

front of his truck until McClelland fell, and Finley drove over him,

according to court papers. Crostley and Finley then allegedly drove to

a car wash to clean off the blood.

Crostley and Finley are jailed

on charges of murder and evidence-tampering. Finley's attorney did not

immediately return a message. There was no answer at the phone listing

for Crostley's lawyer.

As in many small towns, some of the

players are connected. The district attorney, Gary Young, was once the

court-appointed lawyer for Finley, who was charged with murder in 2003.

Finley eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to

four years.

In that same case, McClelland pleaded guilty to

perjury for providing a false alibi for Finley. He was sentenced to

five years' probation but served some jail time when he violated its

terms, prosecutor Bill Harris said.

McClelland's mother said that

on the day her son died, he had called Finley to ask for his help on a

home repair project at another friend's house.

"For the life of

me, I cannot understand it," she said. "They didn't have to run over

and kill my baby. They could have brought him home."

Copyright ©  2008   The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Not a hate crime ?

How fast do you have to be going to scid 70 feet ?

About 200 miles an hour ?