Billy Ray Johnson suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him permanently brain damaged because, "the black boy was somewhere he shouldn't have been."

Ever hear of Linden?  No, not "Mr. Game 7" Trevor Linden of the Vancouver Canucks...but the small up and coming town, birth place of T-Bone Walker and Scott Joplin?  Well, if you haven't...wake the phuck up. 

Linden is a quaint little town in Texas where people mind their own business and seem to name their children after characters they see in a Clint Eastwood movie. 

It's also home to some pretty nasty fire ants, and of four white men involved in attacking a mentally disabled black man in 2003 and dumping him, unconscious and bleeding, along a country road in the middle of the night.

Billy Ray Johnson, now 46, has not recovered from a blow to his skull and will need nursing home care the rest of his life. The men involved were convicted of minor criminal charges; the longest sentence imposed was 60 days in jail.

And to think, just last year, Linden hosted the inaugural T-Bone Walker blues festival.  Now people worry the Johnson case will hurt efforts to boost tourism here with the new Music City Texas Theater.

"Just as we were starting to get great publicity for a small town, the Billy Ray incident happened and made it kind of an uphill battle," says Richard Bowden, a City Council member and country singer who runs the theater.

"the Billy Ray incident"

Can you believe this shit?  Even after Mr. Johnson gets the shit kicked out of him and is left mentally disabled..it's still somehow his fault? 

Three of Johnson's assailants were recent high school graduates: Wes Owens, then 19; Dallas Stone, then 18; Colt Amox, then 20. The fourth, Cory Hicks, then 24, was a jailer with the Cass County Sheriff's Department.  Whole Story

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