Egg-Toss Prank Turns Deadly in Ohio

In this undated photo released by Kelly Crawford, her son Danny Crawford is shown. It was misbehavior certain to raise drivers' blood pressure: kids, out after midnight, egging cars along a busy thoroughfare. The mischief turned deadly when the driver of a gray Jeep barreled down an alley after the boys and pulled a gun, firing multiple shots that killed 14-year-old Danny Crawford, who had recently moved to the neighborhood and didn't know his way around. (AP Photo/Photo Courtesy of Kelly Crawford) (AP)

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 if 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.

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?" Hannah Pulse, 13, a friend, said 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.

Crawford's killing happened Dec. 2 in a struggling neighborhood of century-old homes plagued by poverty and drug abuse. It's common to see prostitutes after dark and hear late night gunfire.

The church parking lot where Crawford and his buddies were hanging out that night is about a mile from his father's house, and friends said he didn't know the layout well.