The Knoxville Massacre - hate crime or an aberration?

Knoxville - A youthful couple ends an evening of movies and making out. As the girl prepares to leave for home in her car, her boyfriend leans in the door to get some sugar, and then someone put a gun to the back of his head.

It was the beginning of an ordeal in which 5 people - 4 men and a woman - over the course of several hours repeatedly raped the couple, cut off the boy's penis, set him on fire, and then shot him to death and left his body burning on some nearby railroad tracks. The girl suffered for several hours more as the rapists continued to savage her, poured lethal substances down her throat in an attempt to destroy DNA evidence, and stuffed her body while she still lived inside trash bags, where she suffocated.

Investigators found her butchered remains in a trash can, thrown away like a sack of garbage.

At one point, the five defendants obtained the right to new hearings based on a reversible error made by the trial judge, and residents of this Tennessee town in the Smoky Mountains have taken to carrying concealed firearms everywhere they go.

Self defense experts counsel their pupils to start fighting immediately if they are the subject of a carjacking or an abduction, because once an assailant has taken a victim to a private place, death - viciously exacted through sadistic means - usually follows close behind.

Much outrage has spread through both the white and black communities due to allegations of black on white hate crime and a lack of national media coverage, which white activists point to as racial bias.