White supremacist ex-con dies in shootout
DECATUR, Tex. A former inmate and white supremacist who may be tied to the slaying of the Colorado prisons chief is dead after a high-speed chase and shootout with Texas deputies, authorities said Friday.
Evan Spencer Ebel, 28 had a long record of convictions since 2003 for various crimes including assaulting a prison guard in 2008. He is also suspected in the killing of a pizza delivery man whose body was found Sunday.
Ebel was a member of a white supremacist prison gang called the 211s, a federal law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
Colorado officials would not confirm Ebel’s gang ties or say whether they had anything to do with the death of prisons director Tom Clements, who was shot to death Tuesday night after he answered his front door. But they said that, since Clements’s killing, state troopers have provided extra security for Colorado government officials.
“We are at a heightened alert,” said Steve Johnson of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation at a Friday news conference.
Denver police said they were “confident” Ebel was also involved in the death of the pizza man, Nathan Leon, 27.
The FBI and local officials were also beginning to examine another case that appears similar to the Clements killing — the Jan. 31 slaying of a prosecutor who was gunned down as he walked across a parking lot to the courthouse in Kaufman — about 160 kilometres from where Ebel crashed and got into the shootout.
Authorities have investigated whether Mark Hasse’s death could be linked to a white supremacist gang. On Friday, they said they will see if there is any connection to Clements’s murder.
Ebel’s tie to Clements’s killing comes from the car he drove — a black Cadillac with mismatched Colorado plates that fit the description of a vehicle spotted outside Clements’s home just before the prison chief was shot.
Texas authorities spotted the car Thursday and gave chase after Ebel shot and wounded a deputy. They fatally shot him after he crashed into a tractor-trailer and opened fire on his pursuers.
Ebel is not on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremist groups, but the centre rates the gang as one of the most vicious white supremacist groups operating in the nation’s prisons, comparable to the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
Founded in 1995 to protect white prisoners from attacks, it operates only in Colorado and has anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 members, senior fellow Mark Potok said Friday.
The gang has grown into a sophisticated criminal enterprise in which members are assigned military titles such as “general” and extort money from fellow prisoners, regardless of race.
Released members are expected to make money to support those still in prison, Potok said. He said members have to attack someone to get in and can only get out by dying.