For the first time in history, the wife of a United States prosecutor was murdered along with her husband when Texas District Attorney Mike and Cynthia McClelland were found shot to death last Saturday in their home.
While the motive for the apparent and unprecedented assassinations are still unknown, authorities suspect Mexican drug cartels and their associates that are escalating and infiltrating major cities in the United States were behind the apparent executions.
As Breitbart News reported, some in the national security community believe the reported murders, especially since McClelland’s wife was also gunned down, are bold and darings acts of escalation by various drug cartels and groups who may be associated with them.
A “national security expert who has spent several years in intelligence gathering operations around the Mexican drug cartels’ criminal insurgency into the continental United States” commented to Breitbart News that, “this assassination of DA McClellend and his wife is meant to send a message: no one is safe, no one is beyond our reach. We will kill you and your loved ones. We are in control here.”
“This is a significant point of escalation in the crisis,” he said. “This type of high-profile targeting of public officials is a classic insurgent tactic. Its escalating use inside the US shows a complete lack of fear of consequences and demonstrates the fundamental shift in the strategic landscape that has already occurred.”
Two months earlier, McLelland’s boss, Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse, was murdered as he was entering a courthouse on January 31. McLelland said his office has prosecuted several cases against racist gangs, which are active in the state and may be working with Mexican drug cartels.
When Breitbart News interviewed McClelland two weeks before he was apparently murdered, he said he could not comment on whether “low-level Mexican cartels have had involvement with the Aryan Brotherhood in Texas regarding methamphetamine trafficking,” or if it was “possible the Aryan Brotherhood is either acting as hitmen or paying prosecutors back.”
Regarding the latter, McClelland said, “I can’t comment on that investigation. I will say with the caliber of people working on it, I feel confident justice will be served.”
According to reports compiled by the Associated Press and The Prosecutors Memorial at the University of South Carolina, 14 prosecutors have been killed over the last century in the United States.
Five of the 14 executions have occurred since 2000.
According to the report, a deputy district attorney in Denver was gunned down in his backyard in 2008;Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael C. Messer was murdered in Columbia, South Carolina in 2001; and a prosecutor in Kentucky was gunned down in 2000 in a shootout in which the murderer was also killed.
Photo: Kaufman County Texas District Attorney’s Office; Ian C. Bates/Staff Photographer
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