COLUMBUS, Ohio – It was the sort of commonplace misbehavior that raises blood pressure across the nation’s roads: kids, out after midnight, egging cars along a busy thoroughfare.
This time, though, the mischief turned deadly. The driver of a targeted gray Jeep barreled after the boys, and someone inside pulled a gun, firing multiple shots that killed 14-year-old Danny Crawford.
Police are still seeking the gunman more than two weeks after Crawford’s death. They have interviewed the Jeep’s owner but aren’t saying whether that person is a suspect.
“I’d like to know where he is. I’d like to know why he won’t come out and admit what he did,” said the teen’s mother, Kelly Crawford, 35, a Fredericksburg, Va., office worker.
Danny Crawford, raised in Virginia, where he lived with his mother, had moved to Columbus over the summer to be with his father. He decided to stay for the school year, attending eighth grade at a middle school a few minutes from his house.
“We’re just wondering why it happened to him and why would somebody even think to do that?” said a friend, Hannah Pulse, 13, of Crawford’s slaying.
Crawford’s death was reminiscent of a shooting in Indiana last year when a motorist whose truck had been egged by teenagers chased the youths and opened fire in a parking lot, killing one boy and wounding another.
Three years ago, a young man in northeast Ohio was shot to death after throwing tomatoes at passing vehicles, a common prank in the Amish community.
Cars give people a sense of anonymous power that helps explain such confrontations, a type of road rage, said Northeastern University criminologist Jack Levin.
“People are reacting from their gut in the heat of the moment, and if they had a little time to think about it and cool off, they might not respond at all,” he said.
It was after midnight when the shooting happened. The teens were in a lighted church parking lot where it was common for kids to play basketball or roller-skate, and adults were nearby. Someone showed up with eggs, and the kids started tossing them at each other, said Bobby Messer, 43, father of a 14-year-old, Devon.
At some point, police say, the boys began lobbing the eggs at cars along a busy four-lane stretch of U.S. 40, the old National Road that divides Columbus in two. A police detective says it was another boy who threw the egg that hit the Jeep.
Family members say the prank was out of character for Danny.
“We had hoped that he would graduate from high school, possibly go to college,” said his grandmother, Gayle Shiner, 65, of Fork Union, Va. “We hoped he would date and marry and have children, and of course all of that was ended because of somebody’s stupidity.”
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