Eggs Kill

Egg-toss prank turns deadly

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - 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.