Everybody has moments when they’re bored. But according to police in Oklahoma, three teens in Duncan, Oklahoma, decided to shoot Australian baseballer Chris Lane who was jogginb nearby. Because, police said, they were bored.
Because they could.
When police asked why they murdered Lane, one of the teens said the motive was “We were going to kill somebody.”
And now families in two countries are utterly devastated, in shock, and their lives will never be the same again — all due to an act of random killing. CNN:
A random act of violence has left a promising 23-year-old college baseball player dead, a family devastated and two countries half a world apart rattled.
Christopher Lane, who was from Australia, was gunned down in Duncan, Oklahoma, while he was out jogging last week. The motive? Three teens who had nothing better to do, according to police.
“They witnessed a young man run by on the street. Chose him as the target,” Police Chief Danny Ford told CNN affiliate KSWO.
Charges were filed Tuesday against the three teens.
James Edwards Jr., 15, and Chancey Luna, 16, were charged as adults with felony murder in the first degree, according to Kaylee Chandler, Stephens County Court Clerk.
Michael Jones, 17, faces two charges — use of a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon and accessory after the fact to murder in the first degree, she said.
A judge set bond at $1 million for Jones, while no bond was set for Edwards and Luna, Chandler said.
The youths looked terribly young and more stunned than scared when they were led individually into a packed courtroom in rural Oklahoma to face charges for the murder of Christopher Lane, an Australian they had never met.
The prosecutor, Jason Hicks, repeated the terrible details already shared by police – that Mr Lane, who was visiting his girlfriend, Sarah Parker, had jogged past the boys as they sat around outside a house on Friday afternoon; that they selected him as a target, followed him in a car and shot him about four minutes later.
For people trying to understand what drove the boys to kill Mr Lane, their brief court appearances offered a few hints but no answers beyond the information already released by local police, that they were bored.
And the additional collateral damage:
Chancey Allen Luna, 16, is accused of pulling the trigger of the .22-calibre handgun that was used to kill Mr Lane. He was charged with first-degree murder and refused a bond before being lead away in his orange prison pyjamas, shackled hand and foot. As he stood before the judge, his mother sitting in the third row, was handed documents detailing her son’s rights. Her hands shook as she gripped the papers and she sobbed as he was led away.
Two rows in front of her, Cindy Harper, Sarah’s mother, sat quietly throughout the proceedings.
The Sydney Morning Herald interviewed his devastated and dismayed girlfriend:
Standing on the drying strip of curbside grass on Country Club Road where Chris Lane died on Friday afternoon, his partner, Sarah Harper could only bring herself to say a few words this morning.
“This is where his final moments were,” she said, gesturing to the floral tributes that now mark the site. “It means a lot to me that people care. This is where he was last alive so I like being here.”
Ms Harper was accompanied by her cousins Tara Harper and Jeremy Wyre, who had made a wooden cross with Mr Lane’s name engraved and burnt into it for the site.
And so another promising life of a 100 percent innocent victim ends. And the answer to “why” will never make sense to his family, to the alleged killers’ families (who’ll likely insist forever that they were good boys) or to his girlfriend.
Or to anyone.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.