As the defendants of the recent murder of Chris Lane, an Australian student and baseball player, are awaiting trial this week, there is one vital piece of information the mainstream media seems to be willfully ignoring. Though there is some evidence indicating that both racism and boredom played a role in the violent killing, they ignored piece of information is that Lane was likely the victim of a brutal gang initiation ritual.

According to Duncan resident James Johnson, the three youths accused in this case had been trying to recruit his 17-year-old son into a gang. When his son refused to join, he received a death threat via a Facebook page, which prompted Johnson to call the police. Police arrived in time to arrest the youths and save Johnson’s son; they later found ammunition for a .22-caliber revolver like the one they allege was used to kill Lane.

Though the youths admitted to shooting Lane out of boredom, Johnson has since gone on record saying that he had known the three alleged killers all his life and is convinced that they killed Lane as part of a gang initiation rite. “I don’t think it was an initiation—I know it was an initiation; my son told me it was an initiation,” he told Fairfax Media.

If Johnson is correct, the revelation could go a long way in providing a motive for the killing, and in highlighting a serious national problem. Gang violence has become one of the most serious curses currently afflicting the nation, accounting for almost half of the violent crime in America—and up to 90 percent of violent crime in certain districts.

The fbi’s 2011 National Gang Threat Assessment reports that there are 1.4 million gang members comprising more than 33,000 gangs in the United States. These figures represent a 40 percent increase in members and a 65 percent increase in groups since 2009. While the fbi admits that some of this apparent upsurge can be attributed to more accurate reporting methods, it is undeniable that there has been a shocking increase in gang activity since the recession of 2008.

Even though these 1.4 million active gang members still represent less than half of a percent of the American people, that half percent is responsible for 48 percent of the nation’s violent crime.

Most of these gang-related crimes are perpetrated in America’s inner cities; 80 percent of all Chicago homicides are attributed to gangs. Sadly, such heartrending statistics will only get worse as America slides further down the path of economic decline and family breakdown.

Numerous studies have shown that family breakdown is the surest predictor of poverty and crime. As one counselor at a juvenile detention facility in California told the Patriot Post, “If you find a gang member who comes from a complete nuclear family, I’d like to meet him. … I don’t think that kid exists.”

According to the Patriot Post article, 85 percent of youths in prison come from fatherless homes. The same is true of 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of high-school drop-outs, and 63 percent of teen suicides.

James Johnson described the three youths—James Edwards, Michael Jones and Chancey Luna—as good boys gone off the rails. “They don’t have proper fathers in their lives,” he said. “You can’t be a friend to your son, you got to be the father. I feel very sorry for them, they have ruined their whole lives, but they did the crime, they have to do the time.”

In the first chapter of Isaiah and the fifth chapter of Ezekiel, God, the master sociologist, foretold of a wave of violent crime that would beset the nations of end-time Israel if they rebelled against His laws concerning family. He even went so far as to predict that it would be “strangers” within the land of the Israelites who would burn the cities with fire if the people rebelled against Him.

This prophecy is being fulfilled in the end-time Israelite nation of America. (Request Herbert W. Armstrong’s book The United States and Britain in Prophecy for proof of this biblical identity.) fbi statistics show that almost half of all the gang members in America are of Hispanic ethnicity, and over a third are of black ethnicity.

These statistics do not denigrate Hispanics or black persons as races. Rather, they highlight the devastating effects that family breakdown has had on these two races in particular. Since the 1960s, a variety of factors—prominently including government immigration and welfare policies—have created a condition where 35 percent of Hispanic children and 63 percent of black children are living in homes with their biological fathers absent.

It is this plague of fatherlessness that is prompting the children of American minorities to join gangs and perpetrate violent crime. God will judge the nation for implementing the anti-family policies that have brought this plague to fruition. Just as the ancient Greek and Roman empires fell in rioting and military defeat when they abandoned family values, so America will fall.

For more information on the consequences of family breakdown in America, please read “Why Dick and Jane Join Gangs” and editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s booklet Ezekiel: The End-Time Prophet.