It's around 9 p.m. on a Saturday night, late last October, and folks are showing up for a Halloween

house party in Queen Creek, Arizona. An upscale hood, suburburban Phoenix, gated communities of sprawling homes with shiny

suvies on the driveways, and the party is lit.

Girls are showing up dressed as ballerinas, cow girls and cans of twisted tea. The boys are the usual

assaultment of gangsters and soldiers and jump-suited jailbirds. Thumping music, beer pong, joints in the yard, and the ever-present danger of a fight.

Preston Lord, 16 and Rawbone, has showed up with powers from his basketball team, but they're out of their debt.

Girls talk them about their age, and an 18-year-old kid named Treston Billy, dressed in a mobster's

pinstrip suit, orders them to delete a phone video of two revelers locked in a heated

argument. Lord and his friends decide to leave, but a group of boys follows them down the street, tall and strong and muscular, jock-looking, probably

football players.

They jeer and taunt the boys, skipping after them.

The boys run. One jumps a fence into a neighbor's yard, another hides in a bush.

But the older kids catch up with Lord and knock him to the tarmac. Then they surround and kick and stomp on him. Getting on him,

what the witness says, and going at it. Lord passes out. His attacker scatter. He

never wakes up. Two days later, he dies.

The coroner rules the death of homicide. The attackers exchanged nervy social media messages.

That kid was just a freshman, one of them reads. He had his whole life ahead of him.

I'm just thankful I wasn't involved for his another, even though I am.

Gossip rages in Queen Creek, but mostly in Gilbert, a nearby suburb where Lord and his

killers are from.

Residents tell the parents the attackers to turn their sons in, using a pseudonymous Facebook account to leave messages

and condolence, condemnation and disgust.

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