Slain Australian Baseball Player Mourned On 2 Continents

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DUNCAN, OK. (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.'”

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