Hunting Season (17 page)

The group of young men was now upon them, breathing hard and bouncing on the balls of their feet, pumping their arms, laughing, and bumping into each other unself-consciously, the way teenagers do. Were they joking? Were they high? Drunk? Loja could practically smell their breath.

There was nothing to do but to stand their ground and fight. Loja turned to Lucero and yelled, Watch out!

CHAPTER 7

A MURDER IN THE SUBURBS

When they spotted the men, Kevin “Kuvan” Shea was almost joyful, like a father finding his child’s favorite toys under the bed. “There you go. They are right there,” he said. Taking large steps, he approached Lucero and Loja, with Anthony and José at his heels.
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Loja noticed that the teenagers had separated into two groups, as if to block any possible escape. The attack didn’t seem random but coordinated. They’ve done this before, he intuited, and started looking for a way out. This was not a fight they could win.

Then Loja thought he heard one of the attackers calling them “niggers.”

“I said something like, ‘Come through, nigga,’ which is a term we use to call someone out to fight,” Kevin told detectives later, in the early hours of November 9. “All of us were talking shit.”

Loja, who had already noticed that one of them was black, shouted back, “Who are you calling a nigger? You are the ugly nigger!”

Anthony, José, and Kuvan began to taunt the men to get a
fight going. Yelling insults had worked in the past: get a lonely, drunken man angry and who knows what could happen? Get two powerless and possibly drunk men angry and the fun surely could be doubled. Nick asked, “What’s good, Beaners?” “Beaners” was one of their favorite insults. “Fucking Mexicans” was another. Except for Jeff and Chris and possibly Jordan, the rest began to hurl insults: “Fucking illegals! You come to this country to take our money! You get out of this country!”

Loja and Lucero replied with the only insults they could think of. They called their attackers “faggots.”

Anthony asked them if they had any money.

“No!” Lucero yelled back. “Why don’t you guys go to work like I go to work, so you can have your own money?”

Lucero took his denim jacket off, ready for a fight. Kuvan put his right hand into the waistband of his pants, as if he were going to pull out a gun, and said, “Cut the shit, motherfucker.” Lucero didn’t move. Kuvan got even closer and punched Lucero hard on the face, at the upper edge of his mouth, cutting his lip open. Lucero started bleeding, from his mouth or his nose or both, and Kuvan mocked him, “You’re already bleeding, that’s all I had to do.” Anthony threw a punch at Loja but missed.

On instinct, honed through years of jumping to dunk a basketball, Loja jumped so high he managed to get out of their reach and run toward the alley, where his friend Elder Fernández lived. Lucero ran in the opposite direction, with four of the teenagers closely behind.

Despite all the yelling and commotion, the streets were quiet. No one was at the train station. A train had left about an hour earlier, at 10:42 p.m.; the next one—the last train of the day—was not scheduled to come by until 11:59 p.m.
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They were alone and there seemed to be no time to pull out a cell phone and call the police. Everything was moving too fast and too slow at the same time. Loja could see movements as if in slow motion, and he could hear the insults and the blows as if he were under water. His head
felt stuffed with cotton, but his senses were alert and his skin felt prickly and sweaty. The only thought in his brain was to escape—if possible, unhurt and with his friend.

Out of the corner of his eye, Loja could see that Lucero had fallen. Four young men were yelling and kicking him as if he were a football. For a moment Loja remembered the documentary of the African mammals he had watched earlier that evening with Lucero. This is what they are doing to my friend, he thought. Tearing him apart like hyenas.

At the sight of the blood, the rest of the attackers who had at one point encircled Loja felt emboldened and ran to aid the others with Lucero, who had already managed to get up and was swinging his belt over his head, forcing the gang to move toward the parking lot. At first, Kuvan thought Lucero had a nunchaku; Anthony thought it was a chain with a lock on the end, but Jeff realized it was a belt. A belt seemed less dangerous than a martial arts weapon, and they must have thought that seven young, agile men could easily handle two dazed men, especially with one hurt and bleeding, even if he was swinging a belt. Kuvan gave an order: “Surround them!”

The tone of the fight had changed. This was no longer a one-sided fight, like the one the teenagers had just had, kicking the back and legs of Héctor Sierra while he folded his body, covered his head, and took the blows while screaming for help. In Lucero, they had found the angry man they had been looking for—an opponent who was as fearless as they were reckless. Except for Jordan, who was afraid to hurt his back, the others obeyed Kuvan’s command and crowded around Lucero in a half circle. But Jeff got too close and the buckle of the swinging belt hit him on the head. He quickly touched his forehead, enraged, then took out his pocketknife and approached.

Loja had enough time to pull his belt from his pants to try to help Lucero, but he realized the situation was too dangerous. Too many of them moving around, trying to squeeze in between
the swinging belts. If the attackers managed to grab the belts, their one chance was over. Loja headed back toward the driveway where he had been standing seconds before. He fell to the ground and looked back, searching for Lucero, who this time was trying to follow him, swinging the belt as he walked backward, while keeping an eye on his attackers. Loja got up and ran toward the alley, momentarily losing sight of his friend.

Lucero swung at whoever was closest to him. It happened to be Nick. Jeff noticed and lunged toward Lucero with the open knife in his right hand. Lucero’s back was toward Jeff, but he turned around suddenly, as if he could sense the danger. Jeff, who was about four or five feet from Lucero, continued to run toward him with his arm outstretched—the hand with the knife leading the way. It’s impossible to know if Lucero saw the weapon, if it glinted in the light from the lampposts. Loja knows he didn’t see it. Except for Lucero and Jeff, no one else seemed to have noticed the moment when Jeff plunged his knife beneath Lucero’s right collarbone, close to the shoulder.

When Loja turned around toward the attackers, he saw that Lucero had fallen. He called out to him but Lucero didn’t get up.

Suddenly the fight stopped. Jeff said to Nick, “We really gotta go.” The others were still near Lucero, and Jeff yelled to them, “Let’s go!” Kuvan must have detected a sense of urgency in Jeff’s voice because he too called out for everyone to leave, and they all began to walk away.

Jeff, Chris, and Kuvan walked ahead of the others. When they turned a corner toward Main Street, Jeff said, “Oh, shit. I’m fucked. I stabbed him,” and he showed them the blood on the knife. Chris urged him to get rid of the knife, but instead Jeff cleaned it in a puddle, trying to wash the blood from it, folded the blade, and put it back in his pants pocket. Jeff also told Nick that he had stabbed the man who had been bleeding. That explains it, said Kuvan, noting that all the blood on the man’s shirt couldn’t have been caused by his solitary punch to the face. Anthony, who
had heard Jeff’s hushed confession, told him he “had his back” and offered to take the knife and make it disappear, but Jeff refused and kept walking toward the car with the others.

Some of them thought they might just be able to get away, but then they noticed a camera on a building and realized that was a dangerous sign. If the camera was on, sooner or later they would be found. But before they could even articulate their fears, they heard the siren from a police car.

From his relatively safe spot, Loja called out again: Marcelo Lucero come, come this way. Loja kept calling out to him as the young men walked away. The fight was over. He thought that maybe someone had called the police, but no one was there. They were still alone. Only about five minutes had passed, but to Loja, shaking and pumped with adrenaline, it had seemed like hours. Still hovering over by the alley, Loja once again called out to Lucero, who had gotten up and was staggering like a drunk toward his jacket on the ground. He picked it up and went to join Loja. As Lucero approached, Loja heard the sound first, a hissing, like that of a half-opened garden hose:
pshshsh.
Then he noticed the blood, an ever-expanding stain on Lucero’s shirt. By the time Lucero reached him, the blood had drenched his shirt and pants, down to his mid-thighs. Loja had never seen so much blood before. Instinctively he reached for his friend and asked what even then sounded like a silly question to him.

“Marcelo, are you all right?”

“No. Call an ambulance,” Lucero managed to say before the gurgling sound of his own blood drowned his voice and he slumped over in his friend’s arms.

Loja pulled out his phone and, with fingers sticky with blood, dialed 911.

The operator answered on the first ring, but then Loja’s phone, which had been running out of charge, went dead. That
first failed call, the police would later reveal, was made at 11:52 p.m. The operator called back, and the phone came alive momentarily, but again it died before Loja could utter a word. Desperate, he dragged Lucero’s limp body onto the driveway and placed it halfway under a parked car, hoping to afford his friend some protection in case the attackers came back. He left Lucero momentarily and ran to the small, white-painted house where Elder Fernández lived. He pounded on the door and Fernández, who had been waiting for them, came quickly to the door.

“Elder, help me. They just stabbed my friend and he’s bleeding a lot. Please call 911.”

He did. The call came in at 11:55 p.m. Within a minute, it seemed, two police cars arrived. Suffolk County police officer Frank Munsch was in one of the cars. When he got out, Loja told them what had happened and lifted up Lucero’s shirt so he could see the gushing wound.

“There was significant blood loss,” Officer Munsch would later testify.
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Lucero was breathing rapidly, lying faceup in a pool of blood. His hands and feet shook, but he was conscious and his eyes were open.
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At 11:59 p.m., the officer called for a “rush rescue.” Under oath in court more than a year later, Munsch said that he applied pressure on the wound while making the phone call.
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But Loja has maintained from the beginning that when he showed the officer Lucero’s wound, the officer went to his car, retrieved a rag, and threw it on Lucero but didn’t do anything else except question Loja for a description of the attackers. Short of breath and in broken English, Loja told him what had happened and described the young men as well as he could. Munsch had seen those teenagers walking in the area earlier, and he put out a description over his police radio.
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The other officers asked Loja to go with them. Another police crew had already stopped seven suspicious young men at the corner of Main Street and Ocean Avenue. Would he
help identify them? Reluctantly, Loja got in one of the police cars and was driven away. As he looked back, he noticed the ambulance had not yet arrived.

Christopher Schiera, a dispatcher for the Medford Fire Department and a volunteer with the Patchogue Ambulance Company, had just gotten home in Holtsville when he received the call: an adult male was bleeding by the train tracks in Patchogue, about five miles south. The call came in at 12:01 a.m. on November 9, exactly forty-six minutes after he had finished his six-hour shift.
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The Patchogue Ambulance Company, founded in 1934 by a small group of volunteer firemen from the Patchogue Fire Department, answers approximately twenty-four hundred calls per year, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
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At the time, Schiera was the company’s assistant chief, which meant that he was in charge of staffing the ambulance and overseeing personnel, who were, with one exception, volunteers.

Schiera had been certified as an emergency medical technician of critical care, or EMTCC; he also had an advanced cardiac life support certification. As an EMTCC he had been qualified to attempt resuscitation, perform the Heimlich maneuver, and use an automated external defibrillator—commonly found in public buildings, police cars, and ambulances. In addition, he could have started an IV, administered drugs, performed an EKG, and intubated patients. At the time of the attack, though, Schiera’s EMTCC certification had lapsed. While he was enrolled in a refresher class to get back his license, he wasn’t supposed to perform any of the advanced life support techniques necessary when a patient has lost a lot of blood. He could drive, however, and when the call came over his portable radio for an ambulance driver, Schiera volunteered. Along with his girlfriend, who was also a volunteer, he drove toward the company headquarters to pick up the ambulance and crew that was already in-house. But halfway there, the dispatcher called again. The police department needed
the ambulance immediately. The dispatcher said the man bleeding near the tracks had been the victim of a stabbing.

Schiera knew who was on call at the Patchogue Ambulance Company that day: two people who were certified to administer basic help but not to drive an ambulance. Under certain circumstances—when a patient is in critical need, for example—the company allows drivers not officially qualified to drive the ambulance to do so. This was one of those circumstances. Schiera asked the crew—Stephanie Mara and Gabriel Salerno—to drive the ambulance themselves and told them he would meet them at Funaro Court, where the man lay bleeding.