White men cleared in alleged dragging death of black man sue Texas investigators, prosecutor

Ex-suspects in alleged dragging death file lawsuit

DALLAS — Two white suspects cleared in the death of a black man who was allegedly dragged beneath a vehicle are suing the Texas officials who kept them jailed for more than eight months.

The federal lawsuit filed this week seeks at least $4 million for Shannon Finley and Ryan Crostley, once the main suspects in the 2008 death of their friend, Brandon McClelland. Authorities accused the men of running down the 24-year-old and dragging his body as far as 70 feet beneath a pickup truck.

But murder charges were eventually dropped because of a lack of physical evidence and eyewitnesses. The two maintained their innocence throughout. Months after they were arrested, a gravel truck driver gave a sworn statement acknowledging he might have accidentally run over McClelland.

The trucker was given immunity, and no one has been prosecuted in McClelland’s death.

Named as defendants in the lawsuit are county investigator Chris Brooks, Department of Public Safety officer Stacy McNeal and Toby Shook, a Dallas lawyer appointed as special prosecutor after the DA recused himself because he had previously represented Finley in a different case.

County spokesman Allan Hubbard and DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange declined to comment. Shook did not immediately respond to a message left by The Associated Press.

The lawsuit calls the case against Finley and Crostley “a classic case of police myopia and misconduct” in which authorities ignored evidence that the death was an accidental hit-and-run. It says the two former suspects were deprived of their liberty and right to due process and were subject to defamation, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.

Finley and Crostley remained in jail because they were unable to post their bonds, set at $800,000 and $525,000, respectively. During that time they were kept in single cells, according to the lawsuit. That was verified Thursday by Lamar County Sheriff B.J. McCoy, who said the two were in danger from other inmates.

“They were in isolation because of all the publicity,” McCoy said. “It was for their safety.”

The former suspects said that on the way home from a late-night beer run across state lines to Oklahoma, McClelland left Finley’s pickup after an argument about whether Finley was too drunk to drive.

McClelland’s mangled body was found early that morning along a bloodstained stretch of rural highway outside of Paris, about 90 miles northeast of Dallas. To some, the gruesome death was reminiscent of the murder of James Byrd, a black man who was chained by the ankles to a pickup by three white men and dragged to death in 1998 in the East Texas town of Jasper.

The McClelland case touched off several rounds of protests that brought hundreds of demonstrators to Paris, including members of the New Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam and the Ku Klux Klan. The largest protest was in July, when state police in full riot gear took up positions between groups of black and white extremists who were chanting “Black power” and “White power” across the divide.