Police say three bored teens killed an Australian man attending school in the U.S. for “the fun of it.”
Authorities prepared to charge the teens Tuesday with first-degree murder, while family and friends on two continents mourned 22-year-old Christopher Lane.
Lane was visiting the town where his girlfriend and her family live. He passed a home where the boys were staying, and that apparently led to him being gunned down at random, Police Chief Danny Ford said.
A 17-year-old in the group has given a detailed confession to police.
“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.
Autopsy results on Lane were pending.
Ford told the television station KOCO in Oklahoma City that one of the teens said they shot Lane for “the fun of it.”
Police said witnesses rushed to help Lane after hearing a shot Friday and seeing him stagger and collapse.
“He was face down on the ground, and he was shot in the back with a .22 revolver,” Richard Rhodes told Australian broadcasters. “I had another lady stop, and we tried CPR on him. And he passed away right here.”
