Teenagers, Racism And a Brutal Attack

Tuck's parents divorced when he was 1, and his father was sidelined to occasional visits. His mother, by all accounts, tried to keep her son in line, but was often exhausted from working double shifts. Neither parent agreed to be interviewed.

Richard Rogers, a former high school teacher who lives next door to the Tucks, remembers finding Tuck, at age 9, poking a knife through the cracks of a fence, trying to stab Rogers's pet Doberman.

Over the years, Rogers's car was vandalized. A little girl was assaulted. A Hispanic neighbor was threatened with chants of "Sieg Heil," a phrase used at Nazi rallies. Another girl was stabbed.

Each time, the problem was traced to Tuck, Rogers said.

The teenager who would be Tuck's victim grew up surrounded by a big, noisy, affectionate family: two brothers, one sister and the Galvans. Among them, he stood out as an extrovert.

Besides football, the boy played basketball and ran track. His MySpace Web page, filled with pictures of him smiling with other teenagers, listed his sports heroes: NBA star Tracy McGrady and University of Oklahoma football player Adrian Peterson.

A good student who named history as his best subject, the teenager was homecoming king of his freshman class and looked forward to playing football in his senior year.

Tuck's heroes, meanwhile, were of a darker sort: His half brother, Sammy Bohanan, a skinhead who littered his conversation with racial slurs, had a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on his chest and taught Tuck his ways.

By the time Tuck was 18, he had six assaults on his record: three racially motivated and three against women, said Trent, the prosecutor.

High school proved thorny for the outgoing boy who would be Tuck's victim. In his junior year, he began to use drugs and hang out with troubled teenagers. He was placed at an alternative school for students with disciplinary problems, and the transfer seemed to motivate him to straighten out.

"He was about his business here. He was doing what he needed to do to get out," Principal Michele Kronke said.

"I wanted to get back to" the neighborhood high school, the teenager said. "I wanted to get back and play football."