South Carolina ? Two men who worked at a South Carolina poultry processing plant had spent most of the day together Tuesday, hanging out late into the evening, maybe rehashing their long shifts.

By the next morning, one of the men — who was black — was dead, shot to death and then dragged behind a pickup truck for more than 10 miles down a country road. The other — a white man — was in jail, charged with murder, and authorities were investigating the death as a possible hate crime.

“We’ve not been able to rule that out,” Reggie Lloyd, chief of the State Law Enforcement Division, said Thursday. “You have to chase that down, as an angle of this.”

The FBI has been working with Lloyd’s agency to sort out what led up to the shooting death of Anthony Hill, 30. South Carolina has no state hate crime statute, and federal authorities have not decided if they will take over the case.

The body of the former S.C. National Guard firefighter was found around 4:30 a.m. Wednesday on U.S. Highway 176 in Newberry, a town of about 11,000 in central South Carolina.