ACCORDING TO CBS:

An Australian baseball player out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood was shot and killed last week by three “bored” teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun, police said.

Christopher 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. [emphasis added]

A 17-year-old in the group has given a detailed confession to police, but investigators haven’t found the weapon used in last week’s shooting, Ford said.

Police Chief Danny Ford denies that the killing was “random.” According to the Sidney Morning Herald:

When Chris Lane jogged past three boys on Country Club Road in Duncan, southern Oklahoma, the boys did not see a young man, local police chief Danny Ford says, they saw a target.

“They saw him go by and they said, ‘that’s our target’ and they followed him and they shot him, that’s what he told me,” Chief Ford told Fairfax Media of the conversation police had with the oldest suspect, a 17-year-old boy.

From the Daily Mail, a photo of one of the accused, James Edward, from his Facebook page:

— Comments —

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

Consider this from the CBS News website in respect of Christopher Lane:

Christopher 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.

Notice the numerous verbal evasions (requiring the abandonment of anything like grammatical clarity) in the sentence.  The inevitable and totally mendacious qualification “at random” is, of course, one of them, but there are others, more outrageous.  The syntax of the iteration makes Lane’s having “passed a home where the boys were staying” the cause “that apparently led to him being gunned down.”  Forget gun-control, which is patently inadequate.  We need house-control because merely passing a house can lead to being gunned down.  As to “being gunned down” – it awkwardly elides the actual causality in the incident, which is that three conscienceless killers transitively and actively gunned down Lane.  That is not all.  What in God’s name is the adverb “apparently” doing in the sentence?  Was Lane “apparently” gunned down?  Did passing the house merely “apparently,” shall we say, “cause” Lane to be gunned down?

We might conclude that CBS News apparently hires reporters who passed freshman composition and that Danny Ford is apparently the Chief of Police of Duncan, Oklahoma.

Laura writes:

We must add another rule to John Derbyshire’s “The Talk:”

Do not pass homes in which blacks live.

Mr. Bertonneau adds:

Can there possibly be more?  But there is.  Notice that the attribution to the Chief of Police is not a quotation, but a paraphrase.  I suppose that a contemporary Chief of Police might say something that garbled, but it is equally likely that the reporter garbled it even more in trying to represent the event in as politically correct a manner as possible.  What did “Danny,” the Police Chief, actually say?  We are left guessing.  And then there’s the reference to a “home”: Not, mind you, a house, but a “home,” as the sentence adds, “where the boys were staying.”  How is a “home” different from a house?  A house is structure for family living, in which normatively a family dwells.  A “home” is a much more ambiguous term.  A family can make a “home” (usually in a house), but a “home” can also be a non-family facility, as in a home for the elderly or a home for wayward youth.  What about the phrase, “were staying.”  What does that mean?  Did the “boys” actually live there, or were they only temporary or transient residents?  We are left guessing.

We are confronted with a linguistic paradox.  A person has to expend a good deal of effort to be that shoddy in his language and (“apparently”) in his thinking.

 Laura writes:

Interesting. The reporter is apparently so intent on softening this news that instead of “house,” he  refers to “home,” a word that always and everywhere is comforting.

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