Mail.comDUNCAN, Okla. (AP) — It is a chillingly simple motive: Police say three bored teens killed an Australian collegiate baseball player attending school in the U.S. for “the fun of it.”
As authorities prepared to charge the teens Tuesday with first-degree murder, family and friends on two continents mourned 22-year-old Christopher Lane, who was being remembered as a wonderful young man whose life ended too soon. His girlfriend tearfully laid a cross at a streetside memorial in Oklahoma, while half a world away, his team in Australia placed flowers at home plate.
Lane, who was visiting the town of Duncan, where his girlfriend and her family live, had passed a home where the boys were staying and that apparently led to him being gunned down at random, Police Chief Danny Ford said Monday. A 17-year-old in the group has given a detailed confession to police, and charges were expected Tuesday afternoon.
“They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: ‘There’s our target,'” Ford said. “The boy who has talked to us said, ‘We were bored and didn’t have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.'”
He said they followed Lane, a student from Melbourne attending college on a baseball scholarship, in a car and shot him in the back before driving off. Ford told the television station KOCO in Oklahoma City that one of the teens said they shot Lane for “the fun of it.”
On Tuesday, Lane’s girlfriend, Sarah Harper, laid a wooden cross at a memorial that popped up where Duncan was killed. “We just thought we’d leave it,” Harper said. “This is his final spot.” Harper said she doesn’t know who started the memorial, but it means a lot.
Australia’s Herald Sun newspaper said Lane’s former team, Essendon Baseball Club, would turn its Sunday game against the University of Melbourne into a tribute to Lane to raise money for the family. Roses and a baseball were placed on the home plate on Monday with the message, “A wonderful young man taken too soon. Why?”
Police said witnesses rushed to help Lane after hearing a shot Friday and seeing him stagger and collapse on a road in Duncan, a south-central Oklahoma town of about 24,000 residents. “He was face down on the ground and he was shot in the back with a .22 revolver,” builder Richard Rhodes told Australian broadcasters. “I had another lady stop and we tried CPR on him. And he passed away right here.”
Harper said she and Lane had only returned to the United States from Australia last week. Lane attended East Central University in Ada, about 85 miles west of Duncan. He started 14 games at catcher last year and was entering his senior year.
“He was an absolute joy to coach,” baseball coach Dino Rosato said in a statement issued by the school. “Chris was an extremely well-respected teammate. … He set a great example for all of his teammates, but more importantly for the younger players. He was a mature student-athlete who his teammates could look to for advice and support.”
Peter Lane told Australian media there was no explanation for his son’s death. “It is heartless and to try to understand it is a short way to insanity,” he said. “You just have to gather together as a family and hold on,” he told Sky News TV. “And that’s what we’re trying to do at the moment — hold on.”
Autopsy results on Lane were pending.
One thing for sure, these three black murders will not be convicted by
their own conscience as they were off after this slaughter to kill as
many as they could. Except they were caught.
We have bought and paid for these kids. It’s a safe bet they had food stamp grub in their bellies at the time they pulled the trigger. Now it will cost us taxpayers several million dollars more (per defendant) for the trial and imprisonment. There are many millions more just like them all across the country. They can’t read or write, and would be angrily offended if you asked them to do a real day’s work. When food stamps come to an end with the bankruptcy of the federal government, they will be released on the rest of us like a plague of locusts. As a nation, we are drowning in our own follies.
They saw his blonde hair, and that was his death sentence.
And of course, no one would consider this a “hate crime”, even though this guy was targeted because he’s white.
Didn’t you get the memo? Only whites can commit hate crimes.
White people need their own version of Rev’S Al and Jessie and
maybe our voice would be heard.
Never gonna happen. Any white guy that stood up and made a fuss would be gaoled as a hate criminal and destroyed by the media. Sadly, it would be whites that destroyed him.
Too true, JR. Years ago I listened to a program discussing hate crime, and the interviewee pointed out that Hispanics are technically Caucasians. So in the FBI crime statistics, if you are a Hispanic who attacks a white, it goes into the record as Caucasian-on-Caucasian, therefore it cannot be a hate crime. If you are a Caucasian who attacks an Hispanic, it goes in the record just like that, and therefore can be potentially considered a hate crime. Neat, hey? Now if they could only figure out something similar for blacks, maybe by assuming that since virtually all African-Americans have some white blood, they’re really Caucasians for crime reporting purposes. But if your skin color is a couple of shades lighter than your victim, it’s definitely a hate crime. Cops could have little color-scale sample booklets like at the paint store, then everything would be official and fair, right?
R.I.P Mate. Maybe obama can pull some strings and get these human trash off the hook, after all, if he had a son, he wouldn’t look like Christopher Lane.