Before I start, yeah, burning another person is wrong and all that. Now that that's out of the way, there's just a few things that just aren't quite adding up here.
First off, why was he borrowing 40 dollars from people who quite obviously didn't have his best interests at heart? Based on what the story is saying here, I'm imagining an almost mafia-esque type dealing. He didn't realize these people seemed slightly psychotic? Also, why was he borrowing 40 dollars in the first place? His family seems decently well off if his dad was not only able to invest 500 dollars in a custom bicycle, but was okay with lending it to his son. Maybe the thugs broke onto his premises (SP?) and damaged the bike then, but I'm going to presume that's not the case for the sake of my argument. And then there's the whole issue of whether or not the victim here was taught to pay back money he owed. It's not as if the thugs bee-lined straight to torching the guy, there was very likely a lot of build up before it.
Anyways, like I'm sure all y'all love to do, I'm going to say a lot of the blame here lies with the parents. No, not just the burninator's parents, but the victims too. Or maybe the victim himself. He should have either gone to his parents in the first place, or just respected their wishes instead of going behind their backs to acquire the funds necessary to get the game (Which, once again, if the parents were teaching him right, he would have saved up money for if he wanted if badly enough). Also, the parents should have drilled into the victim's head that dealing with people who clearly don't have your best interests at heart is likely to get you bu...Not finishing that one. Anyways.
I don't think the firestarters need to be shot, but certainly punished severely, and then rehabilitated. I'm not going to toss away lives at such an early stage, irrelevant of what they do. We need to show them some sort of higher thinking, better way.