Tyler Boydston
Managing Editor
August 16 was a difficult day for Duncan, OK.
Shots rang out in the small town on that afternoon as three teenagers shot and killed Australian baseball player Chris Lane. As sad as the situation was, the events that followed were even more disheartening.
Being that Duncan was my hometown, I was quick to defend it. I saw news articles left and right talking about the delinquency of the town, and it hurt me to think that Duncan may only be known for the worst aspects. The truth is, though, that Duncan has had situations like this before. It does not necessarily mean that it is a bad town, though.
On Labor Day, the Chris Lane Memorial 5k took place in memory of the fallen athlete. In a grand show of support, over 400 people arrived to pay tribute to Lane and show their support for his close friends who have been dealing with their grief for the past few weeks. Not only did people from Duncan show up, but also people from throughout Oklahoma came to show their support. Duncan is that kind of community.
When I was in the hospital as a result of a seizure of unknown origin during my senior year of high school, I returned home a week later to an outpouring of get well cards, and welcomed back by a multitude of friends and family. Duncan is that kind of community.
Back in December, a friend of mine passed on as a result of a tragic car accident. She was someone who I had gone to high school with and stayed in touch with in our years post-graduation. When she passed on, our show choir from junior and senior years reunited to say goodbye to her, and when I got to her funeral, I saw that our former choir teacher had come along with the new class of students, all in their uniforms, just like my friend would have wanted. Duncan is that kind of community.
In the weeks since the shooting in Duncan, things have looked grim. People called in threats to Duncan Public Schools, and my friends and family in town were in panic mode. I was along for the madness. I had to sit back and wonder whether or not my own nieces and nephews were in good hands as they went to school.
Duncan will be forever changed by the senseless murder of an innocent man, that much is more than well known. What I didn’t expect to see after the event was the amount of hate speech spewed across the Internet by faceless individuals wishing death and even worse upon those who had committed the heinous crime.
After the names of the suspects were released to the public, I decided to check out their Facebook pages like every other curious person would do, but what I found was absolutely sickening. What I was disgusted by were the reactions of people on Facebook to the murders, rather than the actions of those who had committed the crime. While their posts showed that the murder was planned or at least thought up before they went out with the gun, their friends’ responses sickened me.
A friend of one of the teenagers involved in the murder created a group on Facebook called “Free Bug” a few days later with the intention of getting the teenager in question released from jail; the last time I checked, it had 24 likes. There were 24 people who didn’t understand the gravity of the situation in which one man had his life taken away because three teenagers said they were bored.
The number of people in support of the teenagers was not the only disgusting thing, however, as many people began posting severe amounts of hate speech on one of the boys’ pages. The page has since been deleted, but I got to see it before its deletion and I was appalled. Grown men were posting about prison rape and wishing awful and terrible things upon these teenage boys. Grown men were posting these things. The grown men posting angry things to Facebook were citizens of Duncan, but were not representative of the town as a whole.
Duncan, a town that I will forever hold in my heart, has been torn apart by the senseless actions of three teenage boys.
So remember to keep Duncan in your thoughts. Remember to be sensible. Remember that there are good people in the world. More importantly, remember more than anything else that the actions of the few do not outweigh the actions of the many. While there are and always will be bad and destructive people in the world, there are far more good-hearted people; it’s not such a dark and scary place.