Activists and the family of a black man who was dragged to death behind a pickup truck last month denounced his death as a hate crime during a vigil Saturday.
Activists from Dallas and Houston joined family members of 24-year-old Brandon McClelland in calling for hate-crime charges.
"I just want justice to be served," his mother, Jacquline McClelland, said.
McClelland died after going with two white friends on a late-night beer run across the state line to Oklahoma on Sept. 16, investigators said. Authorities said he dragged as far as 70 feet beneath the truck.
The case has raised racial tensions in Paris, a town of 26,000 with a history of fraught relations between blacks and whites.
Black activists say McClelland's killing is eerily similar to the dragging death of James Byrd 10 years ago in Jasper, a town about 200 miles south of Paris. Byrd 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.
"Anybody looking can see that this is a copycat crime exactly 10 years after the dragging death in Jasper, Texas," said Deric Muhammand, of the Nation of Islam.
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Prosecutors in the McClelland case said they have seen no evidence so far that McClelland's slaying was racially motivated and noted that 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."
But Muhammand said he disagreed.
"Then you set a precedent that if a white supremacist wants to kill and murder and lynch a black person, all they have to do is befriend them first," he said.
Jacquline McClelland also said she thinks race played a part in her son's death.
"If you're friends with somebody, friends don't just take somebody out somewhere way away from them and run over and kill them," she said. "That's cold-hearted."
She said Shannon Finley and Ryan Costley told her what happened to her son before police did.
"They had already ran over him and killed him," she said. "Then they had went and washed their truck before they even come to my house trying to explain to me what went on."
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.
Finley and Costley, both 27, have been charged with murder and evidence-tampering in connection with McClelland's slaying.
