You know, when you get right down to it, evil is just evil. There was a heartbreaking story coming out of the United States this week about Christopher Lane, an Australian baseball player who was shot dead by some kids who were bored.

Kids who are bored usually go play video games, find a pool and go swimming, go to the mall, or go watch a movie. What these kids are saying is that the new standard is that when kids get bored, they go find someone to kill.

kill for fun

Based on the confession of one of the three teenagers arrested, they wanted to kill someone for the fun of it. They are now likely to be tried as adults, and if found guilty, I am sure the judge is going to send them away for a very long time.

We seem to now live in a world where human life is not as valued as it used to be. People spend more time loving their pets than they do caring for their fellowman and worshipping things as opposed to valuing life. Based on these societal trends, it would be easy to say these kids are symptoms of a society gone wrong, and perhaps it would not be an inaccurate assessment, but for me, what these kids did was nothing short of pure evil.

Did any of the three think for a moment about the people who would be affected by killing an unsuspecting, innocent ball player attending school in the United States, perhaps with great ambitions of doing fantastic things once he finished school?

"He was an absolute joy to coach," baseball coach Dino Rosato said in a statement issued by the school. "Chris was an extremely well-respected teammate. ... He set a great example for all of his teammates, but more important, for the younger players. He was a mature student-athlete who his teammates could look to for advice and support."

Lane, apparently, was already a leader and was perhaps someone who could have gone on to make a difference in this world. Now, we will never know.

The worrying thing for me is that I see this kind of behaviour right here in Jamaica, where people put little value on human life, where someone is all too willing to kill someone over virtually nothing.

It was earlier this month that a gunman snuffed out the life of 11-year-old Tasanique James, a bright young girl who showed much promise in the little over a decade that she was on this Earth. But her life was cut short by someone not much different from these three teenagers in Alabama in the United States.

Like Lane, James was someone who could have made a difference in her community and in her country, but a bullet from a gun fired by an evil person put an end to whatever dreams these two people had in common.

What galls me is that at the end of the process, should these teens be found guilty, people will be pleading for them to be spared. They will argue that they are only misguided children who need to be rehabilitated. I am not an advocate of the death penalty because I don't think executing criminals changes anything, but in these cases, I am making an exception. Evil is something you destroy, extinguish, exterminate, and as far as I am concerned, the killers of this Australian youth and young James need to be removed from this Earth.

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