DUNCAN, OKLA. - Jennifer Luna sat in a green lawn chair on her small concrete porch one night last week, swatting away mosquitoes and looking at a photo of her son on her BlackBerry. His smile in that black-and-white photo made her laugh. And then it caused her to cry.

Chancey Luna turned 16 in April, and he lives with her in a little two-bedroom home on B Street in a neighborhood that reporters are calling the “gritty” part of this town of about 23,000 people. It’s a town where 14.6 percent of the population lives below the federal poverty level. With a face that resembles rapper Drake, the high schooler is described as a flirt who loves to show off his smile and joke around. He just got his braces taken off last year.

He sometimes talked about joining the Army, but since he missed so many days of school after the December deaths of his stepbrother and stepfather, he had been focusing on restarting the 10th grade at Duncan High. He’s his mom’s “baby boy” who still sleeps with a stuffed animal given to him by a past girlfriend.

That was until two weeks ago.

On Aug. 16, the Friday before school began, he and two others were charged in the fatal drive-by shooting of 22-year-old Christopher Lane, who had been jogging in an affluent Duncan neighborhood that afternoon. The Australia native was preparing to assume the starting-catcher position on the East Central University baseball team in Ada, Okla., when classes started there that Monday.

Duncan was taken aback by the slaying. It isn’t a town that sees a lot of killings. Lane’s death is the town’s second homicide this year - the first was a 14-year-old girl. Her 16-year-old boyfriend is accused of stabbing her because she broke up with him, court records show.

In 2012, the town had one murder, and there were none between 2009 and 2011.

The heavily traveled street where Lane was killed is lined with brick homes that have three-car garages and yards enclosed by privacy fences - characteristic of a mostly well-to-do town in which 82 percent of the population is white and an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent is below state and national averages.

When news first broke about Lane’s slaying and three teens were arrested, many wondered whether the crime was racially motivated.

Police charged Luna, who is of mixed race, and his friend 15-year-old James Edwards Jr., who is black, with first-degree murder and 17-year-old Michael Jones, who is white, with accessory to first-degree murder after the fact and use of a vehicle in the discharge of a weapon. All three have entered initial innocent pleas.

Stephens County District Attorney Jason Hicks has said there is no indication that Lane was targeted because he was white. Luna had once posted a “Black Power” banner on his Facebook page, and Edwards has tweeted that 90 percent of white people are nasty and he hated them. But, Luna’s mother is white and so is Edwards’ girlfriend.

Police Chief Danny Ford said the accused teenagers were “thugs” on a “thrill kill” who had no reason for shooting Lane other than they were bored.

Locals were bewildered that a seemingly motiveless crime happened in their usually boring town, they said. But it wasn’t long before rumors of what took place that day crept into conversations, and people started questioning the boredom theory.

Jennifer Luna is hoping the facts come out soon since the prosecutor alleged that her son is the one who pulled the trigger of the .22-caliber revolver that sent a bullet into Lane’s back, struck both of his lungs and eventually caused his death.

“This ordeal is just very surprising to me,” she said, gripping her phone and glancing back down at the photo of Chancey. “I just can’t see my son doing something like that. I do believe in my heart that my son didn’t pull that trigger. And he’s told my brother, he’s told my mom, he just told me yesterday, he said, ‘Momma, I didn’t pull that trigger.’ … Something’s just not right about it. There’s something the cops aren’t saying. There’s just something not right about the whole ordeal.”

Luna and Edwards are being held without bail and face life in prison if convicted. Jones’ bail is set at $1 million, though he hasn’t met it. He faces up to 45 years in prison if the charges against him aren’t upgraded. He reportedly admitted to being in the car when someone else shot Lane, but Luna and Edwards deny being there.

Oklahoma law allows for someone to be convicted of felony murder if they were involved in certain crimes when the murder occurred, even if they weren’t the one to pull the trigger.

A GANG IN DUNCAN

Luna and Edwards, better known as “Bug,” are close. Edwards lived with Luna in his mother’s house on B Street for a few months this summer, and Edwards called Jennifer Luna, “Mom.” It wasn’t unusual for the 15-year-old to jump from house to house, friends say.

The boys are seen in Facebook photos throwing up gang signs that stand for Hillside Neighborhood Crips - a self-proclaimed Duncan gang that people around town and even Luna’s mother call “wannabes.”

The gang is a derivative of the Rolling 90s, which is an offshoot of the Crips - a mostly black gang that started in Los Angeles half a century ago.

“Hillside is just a bunch of guys wanting to be together, wanting to follow,” said Charles Calvin, 43, who lives across the street from Edwards’ father and is close friends with Luna’s dad. The tattoo on Calvin’s left arm is a reminder of his younger days: “RNC.” It stands for Rolling 90s Neighborhood Crip.

“It’s just like anything you see on TV,” he said. “They are wanting to follow and be part of a clique or be part of something. They are looking for something they can bond together with and call their own. … They are just teenagers acting out. They wasn’t thugs. They were misguided.”

Luna’s mother knew the 16-year-old and Edwards represented Hillside. But there is nothing to it, she said.

“That’s just kids calling themselves that. They’re just wannabes,” Jennifer Luna said.

Police in Duncan and nearby Lawton, known to have violence among multiple rivaling gangs, declined to talk about any gang presence in the area.

A week after Lane’s slaying, a spray-painted “Hillside 200” appeared overnight on a barn at the country club just a mile from where Lane was killed. And on the first day of school, police received an anonymous threat that a shooting would take place at Duncan High that morning. Students were allowed to stay home. There was no school gunfire that day.

Hillside’s leader isn’t claiming the tag or the threat, according to 17-year-old Serenity Jackson, a close friend of Edwards.

She, too, downplayed the gang talk and suggested that the graffiti was an attempt to frame the Hillside group for Lane’s death.

While talk about Hillside and whether it had any part in the shooting made its way around town, the gang’s name has yet to appear in police or court documents, or be mentioned by the county prosecutor in the case.

“Only like six [boys] are repping Hillside,” Jackson said. “It’s like a brotherhood.”

Edwards, who lived with Jackson’s family for a while, got into trouble a lot, but he isn’t the gangster he’s being portrayed as in the media, Jackson said. She attributes his unruly and disruptive behavior at school to his mother being in prison on drug charges, his brother being in jail and his sister having just been released from a lockup.

A 4-foot-tall pile of brown paper bags and 32 oz. Miller High Life and Milwaukee Best Premium beer cans cover a corner of his father’s front porch.

“He got picked on about his home life, so he would fight people,” Jackson said with a shrug. “He didn’t go to school a lot, and when he did, he got kicked out. I think it affected him mentally. He’s a good kid; he just played too much.”

In fact, Edwards was a promising wrestler on the high school team. In December, he received a letter from the school superintendent congratulating him on his accomplishments. “I am really proud of you. … Please let me know if I can help you in anyway,” the superintendent said.

What’s a mystery to those who knew the accused teens is why Luna and Edwards were with Jones that day.

The three knew each other, having all been in wrestling when they were younger, but Jones didn’t hang around the other two and normally kept to himself, according to other Duncan High students. Jones is expecting a child with his teenage girlfriend.

“I hadn’t seen Michael in a while, so that’s why it kind of shocked me that he was even with Chancey and Bug,” Jennifer Luna said. She added that “Michael was a good kid,” even if he was an “ornery little toot.”

POLICE: A CASE OF BOREDOM

The only official report on the events surrounding Lane’s death is a detective’s summary that’s included in a probable-cause affidavit filed with the Stephens County Circuit Court.

The 911 call in the case logged in at 2:57 p.m. A woman said a man was in the ditch on the side of Country Club Road with blood covering his back. A contractor working nearby told police that he saw a small black car squealing away from the scene.

Surveillance video from a restaurant down the road shows a small black car driving behind the Duncan Inn Hotel where it stayed about 11 minutes. The report didn’t say what time the car is seen on the footage.

Then about 7 p.m., a man called 911 and reported that teenagers were at his residence with guns threatening to kill his son. Police arrived and found Jones, Luna, Edwards and another boy standing beside Jones’ black 2003 Ford Focus across the street in the parking lot of the Immanuel Baptist Church. All four teenagers were taken to the police station for questioning, the report said.

Jones admitted to police that Luna and Edwards were in his car with him when one of them fired the shot that killed Lane, but he wouldn’t tell which one, according to the detective’s summary.

Luna told officers that he wasn’t there and didn’t know about the shooting. His mother told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that she saw her son about 3:15 p.m. that day at their home when she returned from work. He acted normal, like any other day, told her he loved her and said he’d call her later, then walked to meet friends at a nearby apartment complex, she said.

Edwards told police that Jones picked him up that afternoon to take him to sign papers on a juvenile charge against Edwards and that he wasn’t with Jones when anyone was shot, the detective said. Hicks, the county prosecutor, said Edwards was seen at the courthouse about 3:30 p.m. that day. The teen told police that he knew who shot Lane because he was told who shot him, but he wouldn’t tell them who and reiterated that he wasn’t in the car at the time.

The detective’s report didn’t name the fourth boy, whom police questioned, or mention what he said when interviewed. Edwards, Jones and Luna were taken to jail and booked that night.

An hour later, Jones told jailers he wanted to speak with a detective. When the detective arrived, Jones said he couldn’t say who shot Lane because “if he did he would get killed,” and that police would not find the gun because it was given to someone else, according to the summary report.

Officers didn’t find the gun at the home of the boy who Jones implied had it. That boy told detectives that Jones, Edwards and Luna had gone to his house, but he did not want to get involved so they left, the report said. A search of Jones’ car turned up a “large amount” of .22-caliber bullets, one spent case under the back-seat cushion and a 12-gauge disassembled shotgun in the trunk, as well as marijuana residue. Police suspect that the missing revolver was stolen during a February robbery of a pawnshop in a nearby town.

Before a Stephens County judge issued a gag order last week preventing law enforcement officers, prosecutors and defense attorneys from talking to reporters about the case, the police chief alleged a number of events that aren’t mentioned in the court-filed summary.

Ford reported to the media in Oklahoma that Jones told investigators the boys were bored “so they decided to kill somebody.” The chief told representatives of an Australian website that the teens were on a killing rampage and that they were likely the ones involved in the death of a donkey that was found with a shotgun wound that Friday morning just a few miles away from where Lane was shot.

He pointed to comments on Edwards’ Facebook page, which has since been deactivated by Edwards’ father, that said “Bang. Two drops in two hours.”

Edwards’ friends say the remark was a reference to rapper Chief Keef, who had two songs from his mix tape come out within two hours.

“He’s tweeting Chief Keef lyrics and I tweet them every day, so I should be locked up if that’s the case. He’s just talking smack. That’s just him,” said Jackson in defense of Edwards.

She started the Twitter #freebug and said Edwards won’t give police a name because he doesn’t want to be a snitch, adding, “You can die for that.”

‘THIS IS NOT DUNCAN’

One sunny afternoon last week, Duncan residents, watching a high school softball game, talked about the murder. “Was it really out of boredom? Do we have gangs in Duncan?” they asked one another. They are worried that like Columbine in Littleton, Colo., or Sandy Hook in Newtown, Conn., Duncan will become synonymous with violence and known as the town where bored teenagers killed for fun.

“Most people in town are ready for the media to leave,” said Gregory Tolle, pastor of Duncan’s First United Methodist Church. “Obviously something horrible happened, but all that’s being broadcast is ‘This is the community that spawned a boredom killer, so this must be the cesspool of all evil.’ Our response is not denial. It’s, ‘Oh my gosh! It happened here and what can we do to try to make things right?’”

Many want Lane to be remembered as the promising college student who gave up Friday nights to excel in the classroom and on the athletic field.

“Chris was an absolute joy to coach,” said East Central head baseball coach Dino Rosato. “I will miss watching him work behind the plate. You would never know if he was having a bad day because he always had the ‘Chris Lane smile’ on.”

Rosato called Lane “a mature student-athlete who his teammates could look to for advice and support.”

The Australian initially came to the United States in 2009 on a baseball scholarship to Redlands Community College in Oklahoma City.He was injured his first year there, so when he finally healed and was able to play again, he was older than the rest of the guys on the team.

They looked up to him, said former Redlands teammate Brock Werdel.

“He was an average athlete, but he was above average mentally and an above average leader,” Werdel said. “He was a really great team captain, someone people looked up to to lead. That’s probably what I remember most about him.”

In a 2009 interview with an Australian radio station, Lane joked that all the Americans loved Australian boys’ accents and hard work ethic. He said he was going to gain an awesome experience that he could look back on the rest of his life, adding that “the most important thing to me right now is getting the education.”

That was the year he met Sarah Harper, a thin blond golfer at Redlands college who had played high school softball and golf and was a brown belt in karate.

“I just assumed he was going to marry her and stay over here,” Werdel said. “That was just the way things were going to be. You just really couldn’t think about Chris without Sarah or Sarah without Chris.”

After earning an associate degree in business administration at Redlands, Lane went on to major in business and finance at East Central. He was said to have considered opening his own businesses. He was into world politics and traveling to different places, Harper told CNN.

After graduating from Redlands, Harper enrolled at Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City. She and Lane continued dating, talked about marriage and stayed at her parents’ home in Duncan during breaks and vacations. She was working a mile up the road at the golf pro shop when Lane died on the side of the street. The two had returned just three days before from an eight-week trip to Australia.

Since Lane’s slaying, Harper has created an album on Facebook with 102 photos of her years with Lane, which she captioned: “I love you so much babe. From 2009 until forever, you will always be mine and in a very special and protected place in my heart.”

She plans to return to school this semester, according to family friend Vicki Lynch, who has collected nearly $20,000 from people around the nation in donations for Harper. The money will be used to pay for her travel to Lane’s funeral, which was Wednesday in Melbourne, and any counseling she may need. Also, Harper plans to return to Australia to be in Lane’s sister’s wedding.

“Sarah’s a real gentle spirit,” Lynch said. “God gave her genetics of an athlete, but her heart is just as naive and tender. She just expected the best out of everybody, and that’s why this is so hard.”

Restaurants around Duncan have taken up donations for Lane’s family, and last week Werdel organized a memorial where friends wrote down their memories of Lane on sheets of paper to be sent to his mother, father and sisters back home.

“We kind of came to the conclusion that Chris had two different lives. One here and one in Australia. We kind of forgot that there’s people over there who have known him his entire life. We had so many stories and stuff we wanted to share with them. We wanted to capture this side of Chris,” Werdel said.

On Monday - which would have been Lane’s 23rd birthday - surrounding communities will meet in Duncan for a 5K fundraiser. Harper and her family will return from Australia that day to be able to attend.

Harper has said on Facebook that she doesn’t want people to remember Duncan because her boyfriend was killed there. And after Australia’s former deputy prime minister called for a boycott on traveling to the United States and criticized the nation’s gun laws, Lane’s family issued a statement on the Go-FundMe.com page started by Lane’s former baseball teammates that had raised $172,000 by Friday. The money will go to the family members, who have said they will start a foundation in Lane’s name and donate to his favorite causes.

“We want people to know we don’t believe what happened was a reflection of the people of Duncan or Oklahoma,” the family said. “Christopher was chasing his dreams, and we believe everyone should do the same.”

Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/01/2013