Texas officials boost reward for an arrest in prosecutor slaying
Officials are searching for two people in the slaying of a Texas prosecutor outside the Kaufman County Courthouse Thursday morning.
Mark Hasse, 57, was shot to death after getting out of his car on his way to work, witnesses said. Authorities offered a $36,000 reward for information leading to arrests in the case, and said they expected the amount to double by Friday.
Hasse was an assistant district attorney in Kaufman County. Investigators were sifting through his cases for clues.
“They’re going through all the cases, they’re looking under every rock to see if they can even find the slightest bit of information,” Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Pat Laney told the Los Angeles Times.
One person and then shot Hasse, Laney said. The assailant then got into a late-model Ford Taurus driven by another person and the two fled, witnesses said. Their whereabouts were unknown.
“It could be Dallas, it could be Tyler, it could be the other direction – everywhere,” Laney said.
Hasse, like other prosecutors in the Kaufman County district attorney’s office, would be handling nearly 400 cases at a time, and it would be tough to determine a likely suspect from all the cases he’d prosecuted, Kaufman County District Attorney Mike McLellan said at an earlier news conference.
“It’s simply the nature of the beast,” he said. “When you deal with bad people on a regular basis, you know there’s a potential for bad people to do something bad to you, because they’ve done something bad to someone else.”
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