Three Oklahoma teens say they were “bored,” had nothing to do, and “decided to kill somebody,” police are reporting. 22-year old Christopher Lane, an Australian college exchange student who was visiting his girlfriend’s family in the town of Duncan, OK, reportedly became the target of their “boredom,” for absolutely no reason other than he was out for a jog. Lane was a baseball player on a scholarship, attending East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma.
“A 17-year-old in the group has given a detailed confession to police, but investigators haven’t found the weapon used in last week’s shooting, the chief said,” according to the Boston Globe:
That teen and the others — ages 15 and 16 — remain in custody, and Ford said the district attorney is expected to file first-degree murder charges Tuesday. It wasn’t known if the three will be charged as adults or juveniles. They are to appear in court 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 the 22-year-old 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.’’
‘‘He didn’t deserve any of this,’’ Lane’s girlfriend, Sarah Harper, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. ‘‘It’s heartbreaking that it was such a random choice those guys made that drastically altered so many lives in the process.’’
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 near a roadside memorial at the scene. ‘‘I had another lady stop and we tried CPR on him. And he passed away right here.’’
Australia has very strict gun laws, which were first enacted after a 1996 massacre that took the lives of 35 people.
Watch a video report at Boston.com