Teens charged with killing Australian baseball player for ‘fun’

[soul oasis]

A life of a baseball player taken.. 3 young youths facing serious time and their assess eaten by Bubba soon !



DUNCAN, OKLA.—With a motive that’s both chilling and simple — to break up the boredom of an Oklahoma summer — three teenagers randomly targeted an Australian collegiate baseball player who was attending school in the U.S. and killed him for fun, prosecutors said Tuesday as they charged two of the boys with murder.

Prosecutor Jason Hicks called the boys “thugs” as he described how Christopher Lane, 22, of Melbourne, was shot once in the back and died along a tree-lined road on Duncan’s well-to-do north side. He said the three teens chose Lane at random and that one of the boys “thinks it’s all a joke.”
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Christopher Lane was out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighbourhood when he was shot and killed by three “bored” teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun, police said. zoom
James Francis Edwards Jr., 15, left, and Chancey Allen Luna, 16, centre, were charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of Christopher Lane in Duncan, Okla. Michael Dewayne Jones, 17, right, was charged with being an accessory to murder. zoom

Hicks charged Chancey Allen Luna, 16, and James Francis Edwards Jr., 15, with first-degree murder. Under Oklahoma law they will be tried as adults. Michael Dewayne Jones, 17, was charged with using a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon and with accessory to first-degree murder after the fact. He is considered a youth offender but will be tried in adult court.

Jones wept in the courtroom after he tried to speak about the incident but was cut off by the judge, who said it wasn’t the time to sort out the facts of the case. He faces anywhere from two years to life in prison if convicted on the counts he faces.

The two younger teens face life in prison without parole if convicted.

“I’m appalled,” Hicks said after the hearing. “This is not supposed to happen in this community.”

In court, Hicks said Luna was sitting in the back seat of a car when he pulled the trigger on a .22 calibre revolver and shot Lane once in the back. Hicks said Jones was driving and Edwards was in the passenger seat.
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Edwards has had prior run-ins with the law and came to court Friday — apparently after the shooting — to sign documents related to his juvenile probation. As he requested no bond for Edwards, Hicks said, “He thinks it’s all a joke.”

The two younger boys were held without bond; bond was set at $1 million for Jones.

Before the hearing, Edwards’ father, James Edwards Sr., said he knew where his son was 95 per cent of the time. He was involved in wrestling and football, his father said, and was trying to forge the same sort of athletic career as Lane.

Edwards Sr. said Luna was also like a son to him. Luna’s mother, Jennifer Luna, said: “I know my son. He is a good kid.”

Lane played baseball at East Central University in nearby Ada, and had been visiting his girlfriend and her parents in Duncan.

Duncan police Chief Dan Ford has said the boys wanted to overcome a boring end to their summer vacation — classes resumed Tuesday — and that Jones told officers they killed Lane for “the fun of it.”

Family and friends on two continents were mourning Lane, who moved to the U.S. to pursue his passion for baseball. His girlfriend, Sarah Harper, tearfully laid a cross at a streetside memorial in Duncan, while half a world away, an impromptu memorial grew at the home plate he protected as a catcher on his youth team.

His old baseball team, Essendon, scheduled a memorial game for Sunday to raise funds for Lane’s parents as they worked to have his remains sent home.