An Australian man attending a college in Oklahoma was fatally shot and killed Friday by three teenage boys who police say "acted out of boredom."
Christopher Lane, 22, who was attending East Central University in Ada, Okla. on a baseball scholarship, was found dead Friday while visiting his girlfriend and her family in the small town of Duncan. Three boys aged 15, 16 and 17 are in custody in connection to the murder and will face a court hearing Tuesday.
According to ESPN, Duncan Police Chief Danny Ford said that a woman called 911 after she saw a wounded Lane, a Melbourne native, stumble across the street and then collapse. According to Ford, Lane went for a run and jogged past the house where the three boys were staying. Police say there was no real motive for the boys to shoot and kill Lane, as they were just out to "kill for the fun of it."
While it hasn't been revealed how many times Lane was shot, Ford reportedly told the media that the teenagers followed Lane in a car and shot him in the back before driving off.
"They saw Christopher go by, and one of them said: 'There's our target,'" Ford said per ESPN. "The boy who has talked to us said: 'We were bored and didn't have anything to do, so we decided to kill somebody.'"
Local witnesses rushed to the scene where Lane collapsed Friday after hearing the gun shots, but he unfortunately died from the wounds.
ESPN reports that Ford told KOCO, a television station in Oklahoma City, that one of the boys said they shot Lane "for the fun of it" and the 17-year-old boy gave a detailed confession to the police but the murder weapon has not been found. There was a dismantled shotgun found in the car that the boys drove to the site of the murder, but it wasn't identified as the murder weapon.
The teenagers were caught by police near the car following the shooting, and the shotgun was taken but was ruled out as the murder weapon. Police told ESPN that they've had issues with two of the three boys in the past and are still searching for the murder weapon.
All three teenagers will be arraigned Tuesday at Stephens County District Court, and the district attorney is expected to file first-degree murder charges against them, according to reports. It's unclear if they will be charged as adults or juveniles.
Lane's girlfriend, Sarah Harper, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that the two had just returned from Australia to America in the last week, and she couldn't believe this senseless act.
"He didn't deserve any of this," Harper said to the network, according to ESPN. "It's heartbreaking that it was such a random choice those guys made that drastically altered so many lives in the process."
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