Word: jaspers
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...barbaric dragging death of James Byrd Jr. were a movie--and at times it seemed like pure John Grisham--this was the scene that would have been certain to make it into the trailers. As a scowling John William King, 24, was led out of the Jasper County courthouse in shackles by Texas Rangers last week, reporters asked him if he had any message for the grieving Byrd family. It was a moment when, just briefly, repentance appeared possible. "Yeah," King sneered. He then invited the Byrds to perform a lewd sexual...
...crime as can be imagined--chaining a man to a truck and dragging him three miles until he dies of his injuries. And the protagonist is a dime-store white supremacist, spouting anti-black and anti-Semitic dogma and spewing hatred to the bitter end. Last week a Jasper jury tacked a Hollywood ending onto King's life story, convicting him of first-degree murder and sentencing him to death by lethal injection...
...January Jasper removed a fence that had long separated blacks from whites in the local cemetery. But residents of Jasper are much more concerned about the living and the remnants of what they once believed was racial harmony. According to the Rev. Kenneth Lyons of the Greater New Bethel Church, there was trouble at the Jasper Middle School. Black students had planned to start a junior Black Panther party, and a white student had drawn a Confederate flag in the sand. The principal and church elders quashed the Panther idea and sent the white student home. Says Lyons...
Outside the courthouse last week, men were hawking T shirts with photos of Byrd, along with CDs and hats bearing the slogan THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY, JASPER, TEXAS. LOVE, PEACE & HARMONY. Last Wednesday, Quanell X, leader of Houston's National Black Muslims, showed up with a cadre of black-clad bodyguards, proclaiming what happened to Byrd "a lynching, not a murder," and briefly challenging Judge Joe Bob Golden's order barring demonstrations. Quanell X and his men finally agreed to sit quietly in court...
...more miles to his death. The jury also heard the tale of a young man sent to prison for burglary who emerged as a heavily tattooed member of a Klan spur group. One witness said King plotted to kill a black man when he returned to Jasper as part of a "blood-tie" initiation into the Klan chapter he planned to form. Photos showed tattoos covering much of King's upper body, including the image of a black man hanging from a tree, pentagrams, goat heads, a horned baby Jesus, Nazi SS lightning bolts and the words ARYAN PRIDE...