I'll trust the priest who lives there and knew the victim, but thanks.
That's a good point. My thought, though, is that the boy could have been killed for being a Catholic --- as the priest says --- without the killers necessaily being religious bigots. They could have been irreligious bigots.
Do you really think the killers were religiously fervent youths who had a theological dispute with Catholicism? After all, one can be unchurched, an agnostic, or an atheist and be murderously anti-Catholic.