Ken Bimbo Tillery, 44, of Pineland apparently stopped a vehicle in a rural area of Jasper County, looking for a ride home early Saturday morning.
The driver, Blake Little, 34, agreed on the condition that Tillery pay for gasoline when they arrived in Pineland, Sabine County Sheriff Tom Maddox said Sunday. Little and four others in the vehicle were from Jasper.
``They went by his house, but didn't drop him off because they were going by the gas station,'' Maddox said. ``They got to the gas station, and that's when Tillery tried to depart by running.''
One or more of the passengers chased down Tillery and a scuffle ensued. Maddox said Little then drove over Tillery, killing him.
Little was arrested Sunday on murder charges. The death remains under investigation.
In the same rural area of East Texas, James Byrd Jr. of Jasper died 3½ years ago when he was chained at his ankles behind a pickup truck and dragged for nearly three miles along a bumpy country road until he was dismembered and decapacitated.
Byrd was black and the men in the truck were white.
In this case, Maddox said the five men in the truck were black and Tillery was white.
``It's too early in the investigation to tell whether it was racially motivated, but it's still very much under investigation,'' Maddox said.
Investigators believe both drugs and alcohol were involved.
Pineland is about 130 miles northeast of Houston and about 20 miles north of Jasper.
Isn't that something, I lived in Jasper, Tx, in 1963 and 64, and the Sheriff Dept and the Fire Hall was across the street fron Neches Chevy and Olds where I ran the Body Shop, and if memory serves me right, the sheriff's name was Maddox at that time also.
Jasper County was dry then too, and smuggling booze was a favorite past time.
I went back for a visit around 4 years ago, and it is still a beautiful little town in the Pineywoods area of east Texas, and the last place in the world you'd expect these things to be happening in. Well I swannnn, Lol JH
Sounds like "drunk" crime to me.
Tillery promised he'd buy gas, and didn't, and the car was used a deadly weapon.
The question is, who was using drugs and who was drinking.
That whole hitchhiking thing I don't get.
I've never hitchhiked, and I wouldn't pick up anybody unless they were bleeding.
There is a new book out about the murder of James Byrd, Jr., and this is from the Houston Chronicle review:
Finally (the author) reports that, in the words of a local black minister, "James [Byrd]wasn't what you might call one of Jasper's upstanding citizens." He was a felon, a forger of checks, unemployed. He refused to support his former wife and children. He apparently was also drunk the night he was draggd to his death.
Shawn Berry, one of the murderers, the one who got "life" rather than the death penalty, grew up near a black community, playing with black kids all his life. Several testified on his behalf at his trial. A black woman told me she played with Shawn growing up, and "there wasn't a racist bone in his body." But he's in the pen for life for a "hate crime."
In Jasper, the weekend before the James Byrd murder, a black man beat a white man to death with a pipe. Beat his eyes out of their sockets; it wasn't a "hate crime." The black man had worked for the white man.