The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Friday.



One of the accused teens told authorities that Christopher Lane simply jogged past the wrong house at the wrong time on the wrong day. They were "bored" and wanted to kill someone, anyone, "for the fun of it," one suspect told Duncan Police Chief Dan Ford. Authorities said the suspects were arrested that evening, apparently while stalking another victim.

Even without the relentless news coverage other crimes generate, Lane's slaying has exposed dismal fault lines in an American culture, where three teens without apparent conscience would kill without reason. Or, more precisely, without a motive a reasonable person might understand.

Some in Lane's Australia blamed American gun culture. Others saw thug culture. In the U.S., some were quick to cite race, perhaps seeing a reversal of Trayvon Martin's shooting death in Sanford, Fla.


Yet even with racially charged social media postings attributed to Edwards, no one has claimed Lane's race had anything to do with his being targeted. More plausible, in fact, is the possibility that the three suspects were tied to a Crips sect or were gang wannabes.


Lane, a scholarship baseball player at East Central University in Ada, Okla., was in Duncan - about 80 miles south of Oklahoma City and 160 miles from Dallas - visiting his girlfriend, Sarah Harper, and her parents. He went out for a run and never saw his attackers, who drove up from behind and shot him in the back, leaving him in a ditch.

As far as anyone knows, the assailants had no idea who he was, other than the next person to die. "This is not something that is supposed to happen here," Stephens County District Attorney Jason Hicks said. "This is not Duncan, Oklahoma."

For days, Lane's death has been a dominant news story in Australia, where his grieving father sounds less concerned about specific motives: "It is heartless, and to try to understand it is a short way to insanity."
