Authorities are looking for possible links between the murder of a Texas district attorney and his wife and a prison gang known as the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, the Dallas Morning News reports.
Kaufman County DA Mike McLelland and his wife, Cynthia, were gunned down in their home just two months after an assistant DA was killed near the county courthouse.
Police had already suspected the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas might be tied to the death of assistant DA Mark Hasse. Now the group will be getting even more scrutiny, the Morning News reported, citing law enforcement sources.
The Kaufman County DA's office was one office responsible for indicting 34 alleged members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas for racketeering back in November. They were accused of murder, meth distribution, kidnapping, and other offenses, and 10 of them are eligible for the death penalty.
“Today’s takedown represents a devastating blow to the leadership of ABT,” Assistant Attorney General Breuer said in a statement at the time.
Robert Kepple, executive director of the Texas District Attorney's Association, told USA Today his department got a notice late last year from the state's public safety department warning ABT might be plotting retaliation.
The ABT was founded in the 1980s and modeled itself after the California group known as the Aryan Brotherhood, according to the FBI. Initially, the group was focused on protecting white inmates but has since expanded into a for-profit criminal enterprise.
Matthew Orwig, a U.S. attorney in Texas, told the Dallas Morning News that he believes state and federal agents will begin questioning ABT members in and out of prisons if it continues to look like the group might be responsible for the prosecutors' killings.
“There certainly is a real troubling boldness to these offenses,” Orwig told the paper.
Officials had also been looking for links between Hasse's murder and the murder of the executive director of the Colorado Department of Corrections last month. They have not found any ties between the Colorado and Texas murders, though, according to USA Today.
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