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Suspect Linked to Colorado Killing Dies Suspect’s Ties to Other Killings Explored
(35 minutes later)
DENVER — A Colorado parolee who was captured after a gun battle and chase with Texas law enforcement officers on Thursday, and who was suspected of being tied to the killing of the head of Colorado’s prison system, has died, officials said Friday. DENVER — As investigators unravel the tangled and violent path of a Colorado parolee tied to the killing of the state’s prison chief, they are also examining whether he had connections to two other violent deaths, including the January killing of a Texas prosecutor.
Sheriff David Walker of Wise County, Tex., said the authorities had identified the suspect as Evan Spencer Ebel, 28. Court records in Colorado show that Mr. Ebel had a criminal history dating to 2003, including convictions for robbery, weapons charges and assault. He was on parole in the Denver area. Officials announced Friday that the suspect, Evan S. Ebel, 28, had died after being mortally wounded in a shootout and high-speed chase with Texas police officers and sheriff’s deputies about 65 miles northwest of Dallas.
Sheriff Walker said Texas officials planned to speak with Colorado investigators about Mr. Ebel’s possible involvement with a white supremacist prison gang. Officials said Mr. Ebel had been driving a black Cadillac with Colorado license plates, a car that matched descriptions of a vehicle spotted near the home of Colorado’s chief of corrections, Tom Clements. Mr. Clements was shot and killed inside his home Tuesday night as he answered the door.
Mr. Ebel died in a Fort Worth hospital from gunshot wounds to the head, officials said. Officials said they were performing ballistics tests and looking for other physical evidence. They said they had not established a definitive connection between Mr. Ebel and the killing of Mr. Clements.
He was pulled over about 65 miles northwest of Dallas at 11 a.m. Thursday. He was driving a black Cadillac with Colorado license plates that matched the description of a car that had been spotted near the Monument, Colo., home of Tom Clements, executive director of Colorado’s Department of Corrections, shortly before he was shot to death while answering his front door around 8:40 p.m. on Tuesday. On Friday, sheriff’s officers in Kaufman County, Tex., said they were exploring any connection between Mr. Clements’s death and the Jan. 31 killing of Mark E. Hasse, an assistant district attorney who was gunned down in a parking lot near the courthouse. Kaufman County prosecutors had helped to build criminal cases against members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas.
Law enforcement officials said the man in the Cadillac opened fire on a sheriff’s deputy from Montague County, Tex., and then sped off, heading south at 100 miles per hour. When police and sheriff’s officers from nearby Wise County tried to stop him, he fired out of the car’s window, striking at least two cruisers. Officials in Kaufman County said their inquiries were “routine investigative work,” and said they had not reached any conclusions about whether the murders were linked.
He then crashed into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which crumpled the Cadillac like a tin can. The man jumped out of the car armed with a handgun and fired at officers until he was shot, officials said. In Denver, however, the police said they were “confident” that Mr. Ebel was also a suspect in the killing of Nathan Leon, a Domino’s Pizza delivery driver. Mr. Leon disappeared while making a delivery on Sunday.
“He didn’t look like he wanted to be caught or taken alive,” Police Chief Rex Hoskins of Decatur, Tex., the Wise County seat, said at a news conference. Mr. Ebel’s death in Texas was a violent end for a man who had spent much of his adult life in prison or on parole.
The authorities in Texas said the man could be connected with Mr. Clements’s death and a number of other killings in Colorado. They did not provide any other details. There were multiple reports that Mr. Ebel had joined a white-supremacist gang known as the 211 Crew while he was imprisoned in Colorado. Publicly, the authorities said they were still investigating all aspects of his life, including the extent of his links — if any — to the gang.
Experts who track hate groups said the 211 Crew is a small but vicious white-supremacist gang centered in Colorado’s prisons. In 1997, two of its members carried out one of the most notorious racially motivated murders in recent Denver history, the shooting of a Senegalese immigrant as he waited at a bus stop.
In 2005, more than a dozen members of the gang were indicted on charges of racketeering, bribery, distributing drugs and other charges. News reports and accounts from law-enforcement officers painted a picture of a secretive gang that operates through violence, paramilitary hierarchies, obscure codes, and sexual intimidation and abuse. Officials have said that the gang’s members on the outside funnel money to its imprisoned leaders, known as shot callers.
Mr. Ebel’s connection to the murders shocked his former lawyer, Scott Robinson, who had coached Mr. Ebel’s sister at softball and defended Mr. Ebel in his first criminal cases. Mr. Ebel had convictions for robbery, assault and weapons charges.
“He seemed like a decent kid,” Mr. Robinson said. “I had no inkling that this young man would turn homicidal.”
In 2011, Mr. Ebel’s father, Jack, told Colorado lawmakers about the toll that solitary confinement had taken on his son. “He’ll rant a little bit. He’ll stammer. He’ll be frustrated that he can’t find the words,” he said in testimony, according to a 2011 report from Colorado Public Radio.
In an online memorial for the younger Mr. Ebel’s sister, who died in 2004, his mother wrote of visiting him in prison. She said he was doing “Navy SEAL-type exercises,” writing poetry, eating vegetarian meals and planning for the future. He read voraciously, she wrote. One of his favorites was “War and Peace.”