James Byrd Jr., who was Black, was 49 years old when he was slain by three white men in a racially-motivated killing on June 7, 1998 in Jasper, Texas. The FBI is now sharing details of the agency's investigation into the brutal murder.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is sharing details of the agency's investigation into the brutal murder of a disabled Black man by three white men in a newly released case file.
It was one day after the murder of James Byrd Jr. that law enforcement reached out to the FBI for help with their murder investigation in the Texas town of Jasper, located approximately 125 miles northeast of Houston.
A passing motorist discovered the "badly mangled body" of Byrd on a rural country road on the morning of June 7, 1998, according to the file.
Deputies on the scene learned of a suspicious pickup truck that had been seen in the area overnight and by the end of the day had located that vehicle, according to the file.
Soon, three men—Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer and John William King—were in custody on various state charges as deputies worked to gather the necessary evidence to charge them with murder.
The file says that one of the men agreed to speak with deputies, telling them that the men had "picked up the victim during the early morning hours of 6/7/98 and drove him to a rural area. The victim was severely beaten and then chained to the back of the truck. The victim was dragged on the road, resulting in his decapitation."
It was a murder so brutal that agents later had to decide if they would perform a DNA or toxicology test on Byrd because his body lacked the amount of blood required to do both, according to the file.
Deputies also learned from one of the three suspects that the murder "was apparently racially motivated," at which point the decision was made to call in the FBI, according to the file.
The FBI file initially notes that "all three men have spent time in prison and appear to be white supremacists." Through the course of their investigation, agents learned that Brewer and King met after joining the same Aryan gang while in prison a few years prior. The FBI never found any evidence that Berry was a white supremacist or had ties to any groups celebrating that ideology, according to the file.
Brewer had "several tattoos" that were "consistent with a white supremacist ideology," said the agent who interviewed the murder suspect on June 8. Brewer denied being involved in the murder during that interview but did have a bruised toe and complained of ankle pain, which the agent made note of while also making sure to photograph those injuries.
Agents then managed to find an individual who had seen the suspect vehicle just a few hours before the murder, and within a week the agency had concluded most of its investigation.
The FBI determined that the three men picked up Byrd and the early morning hours and then drove him to a remote area, according to the report.
Once there, the men beat him "unconscious, then tied (him) to the back of a truck with a tow chain and dragged for some distance," wrote one agent citing the autopsy report.
Agents later attributed Brewer's sore ankle and bruised tope as likely being from that beating, according to the report.
"The victim was alive when he was chained to the rear bumper of the pick-up truck and dragged 1,000 yards," according to the file. He was also alive while being "dragged another 2.3 miles along the paved road" until his body "struck a concrete culvert along the road resulting in the torso being pulled apart," according to the report.
That torso was discovered approximately .2 miles away from Byrd's head and right arm, according to the report.
Searches of King and Brewer's residences both turned up evidence that the two men were working to run a subset of the supremacist organization known as the Confederate Knights of America (CKA) as well as multiple words containing white supremacist ideology, according to the report.
The final few interviews in the file are with those who knew Byrd.
One person who saw him just moments before he took that fateful and fatal car ride said that he was in a "good mood" that night while attending a local party, while another described him as "very friendly to everybody" and "harmless," according to the report.
All three men were later convicted of capital murder in the killing of Byrd. Brewer and King became the first two white men in the state of Texas to be sentenced to death for the murder of a Black man. Brewer died in 2011 via lethal injection, and King was killed the same way eight years later in 2019.
Berry managed to avoid the death penalty and will be eligible for parole in 2039. He had been driving the truck that night but claimed to have no idea what King and Brewer planned to do after offering Byrd a ride.
All three men were still alive on Oct. 28, 2009, when President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which expanded what the federal government classified as hate crimes to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.
