| Page 2 of 2 < |
Egg-Toss Prank Turns Deadly in Ohio
Family and schoolmates said Crawford _ called D.J. by his family _ was fun to be around and made a point of helping other kids, cheering them up if they had a bad day.
"Danny was a nice kid, he doesn't get in a lot of trouble," said 12-year-old Cyril Butler, a seventh-grader who played pickup football with Crawford. "He was hanging around the wrong people, honestly."
  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) 
| ||||||||||||||||||||
The boys shouldn't have been throwing eggs at cars, said other teens from the area. But they also said nothing the boys did justified a fatal shooting.
"That's what kids do, they have fun on the weekends," said Kwon Wright, 16, a sophomore at nearby West High School. "That's what him and his boys was up to _ having fun doing what they do."
It was after midnight when the shooting happened. The teens were on 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 14-year-old Devon.
At some point, police say, the boys began lobbing the eggs at cars along a busy four-lane city 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."
___
On the Net:
Columbus Police: http:/
