Hunting Season (21 page)

But the streets were quiet. Where is everybody? he wondered. His phone rang. It was a friend who had more information than he did and directed him to the street where Lucero used to live.
Wolter had never heard of the street, but he found it as soon as he turned a corner and noticed the news vans with their satellite antennas.

Reporters were milling around, and a group of Latino men crowded the sidewalk. One stood out among the others; his face was ashen and his eyes were red-rimmed. Wolter figured he was related to the victim and approached. He tried to get a conversation going, but, not knowing Spanish, he felt like an intruder. When a television camera began to trail him, he thought it was time to leave.

Back at the church, Wolter easily managed to work the events of the day into his prepared text, in which he reflected on the first sermon he had delivered in Patchogue. That first sermon was titled “Traditions and Transitions,” and in it he had explained how the best way to get through a transition was to root it in tradition. This time, he reminded his flock that their church, now his as well, had a long tradition of helping others in times of trouble. And the community was afflicted now, in need of help. Latinos were part of the community, everyone knew that, but did anybody in the church know any of them? Did they know their neighbors? The idea of lily-white Long Island was gone, he said, adding that he anticipated that the killing of the immigrant—Wolter didn’t know his name yet—would be a momentous event in the life of the village. His sermon also opened the door wide to the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of change:

Many people, even right here in church, see this as mere wishful thinking, the stuff of dreamers. They look around this pain-filled world and realize we have been waiting for shalom for over two thousand years and with a sigh they close the book on God’s promise to us. The chance of the dream coming true is simply too remote to get worked-up about.

But every new reality begins with a dream and a prayer. And so don’t talk to me about the statistical likelihood of success. There are too many awesome examples of lives, families,
and communities transformed into places of peace. Despite strong opposition from some people, despite what we have been through, and despite awareness of how difficult spiritual work can be; many people simply will not abandon their dream. It is within the reach of the Congregational Church of Patchogue to build the church of our dreams, and to play an active part in the spiritual transformation of our church and community.

No one had mentioned the phrase “hate crime” to him yet, but to Wolter the hate portion of the crime was obvious. He had felt it brewing for a long time; it was almost predictable. Though he was sure he had never heard about another Latino being attacked in Patchogue, even in Florida he had known about Farmingville and the animosity the events there had created in the entire region.

Later that day, he called Mayor Pontieri and told him he wanted to be helpful in any way he could.

Wolter wasn’t the only one who felt compelled to help, to do something, anything. The moment the live satellite trucks arrived on the morning of November 9, nearly everyone in Patchogue understood that they had only two options: hide from the glare of the cameras and go on with life as usual or face the cameras—and the world—and help the media shape a more complete, nuanced narrative of Patchogue. Most people were torn, but many chose the latter. It was as if a brutal action, such as the killing of a man because of his ethnicity, deserved an equally strong and physical response. But what to do?

Lola Quesada, a patrol officer in the Third Police Precinct, the precinct that covers some of the towns bordering Patchogue and Medford, thought she knew what to do when she read about the murder in the news. First, she sat down her boys—ages twenty-two, twenty, and nineteen—and asked them if they had ever been bullied or taunted or discriminated against because of
their ethnicity. You know, she told them, this could have been you. They said they had seen others being bullied because of their poor language skills, but not them. Born in the United States, her children felt comfortable and untroubled by their own mixed background: Quesada is from Ecuador, and her husband’s grandparents were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Honduran, and English.
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The family lived about a fifteen-minute drive from Patchogue, but she had no idea that fellow Ecuadorians were being harassed in a place she considered idyllic to raise a family. It wasn’t as if she were naive to the perils of being an immigrant. When she had been pregnant with her first child, she and her husband had started looking for a house to buy. The broker kept taking them to see houses in low-income neighborhoods. The houses didn’t look right, Quesada remembers thinking. Aren’t there nicer houses for sale somewhere on Long Island? Then it dawned on her that they were being the victims of housing discrimination. She ditched the broker and found the house she wanted, brand-new and comfortable in an eastern Long Island town, where the majority of the residents are non-Hispanic whites and solidly middle class.

Quesada arrived in the United States legally with her family in 1970, when she was nine, and settled in Queens. Before leaving Ecuador the family had contemplated a choice of three states, California, Texas, or New York, and ultimately chose New York because they had family in New York City. Her father was a lawyer but didn’t have a license to practice in the United States, so he became a social worker for the city of New York. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Quesada married young, at twenty-one, and became a nurse, but in her late thirties she had a change of heart. She decided to become a police officer. Her decision was based both on practical and sentimental reasons. She thought she would make more money and have better benefits, and she also thought becoming a cop was the right thing to do, a way to give back.

There was something about the discipline and rigor of training
for the police officer’s exam that appealed to her. “My father always said I was capable of doing anything I wanted,” she told me when we met at a coffee shop on Main Street in Patchogue in January 2012. “And he thought it [police officer] was the most honorable job in the world.” Quesada worked hard with a friend who trains athletes for the Special Olympics, and at forty became a police officer. When asked about her ambitions in one of her tests at the police academy, she wrote that some day she wanted to be an inspector, a rank just below chief in the police nomenclature.

For six years, she had worked as a cop, patrolling the streets of her precinct. Then Lucero was killed, and the shock of his death jolted Quesada out of her routine. She felt she had to do something radical. She read in the newspaper that Levy, the county executive, was looking for a liaison to the Hispanic community. She had experience and credibility in her community, where, she said, “she had her ear to the ground.” Quesada wanted that job. “I needed to be part of the change,” she told me.

Still distraught over Lucero’s death, she went to visit her mother who had moved back to Ecuador. She was with her when the inspector called with the news she had been waiting to hear: the job was hers.

Julio Espinoza heard about the murder at home, before he went to work that Sunday. Someone called to tell him, and Espinoza immediately recalled the quiet man who often came to his shop to buy a telephone card to call his mother in Ecuador. Espinoza got in touch with some friends and customers, and little by little started piecing together the story. By Sunday evening, it was clear that Lucero had been killed because he was Hispanic. What gave him away? Espinoza wondered. Was it the shade of brown of his skin? His accent? Had he even spoken to his attackers? Was it the way he walked: head down and hands deep in his pockets to avoid unwanted stares?
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Espinoza was in despair. He had two children in the same high
school where, he had heard, the attackers were students. What if his children became a target too? How could he protect them from people who pounced without provocation? His children had told him for years that the school was divided, with Hispanics often being the subject of taunts and even harassment. But he never thought it would come to violence, much less a murder. For the first time since leaving Ecuador he questioned whether leaving home and building a life in a town so far from everything familiar to him had been such a good idea.

For now, the only thing to do was to go pay his respects to Marcelo Lucero. Since no funeral or religious services had been announced yet, Espinoza drove straight to the morgue. But he couldn’t get in, and the last thing he wanted now was to attract attention to himself. Espinoza drove home—carefully.

By Monday morning everyone knew what had happened, even those who had been out of town, like Jean Kaleda, the librarian. She was on the deck of the New London ferry, coming back from a trip to Cape Cod with a group of friends, and enjoying the last hours of a relaxing long weekend when she heard about it.
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Her friend Sally Rein, a forty-year resident of Patchogue, had received a call from her husband who told her that an Ecuadorian man had been killed by a group of teenagers. It was all over the news. Ashen, Rein relayed the news to Kaleda. Did you know a Marcelo Lucero? Rein asked Kaleda, who suddenly felt sick. This is it, she thought. This must be connected to what the English learners at the library had told her just a few days before. Her stomach lurched at the thought that it had come to this. She was stunned at the audacity of teenagers harassing a grown man simply because he was Latino, and horrified that the harassment had resulted in murder.

The rest of the trip home, Kaleda stayed on the deck, thinking long and hard about what had transpired and how it connected to her fears about the world in general and her sense that humankind
never really learned from past mistakes. She also wondered if any of the friends she had made in Patchogue from Gualaceo knew Marcelo Lucero or maybe even were related to him. And she asked herself, though she knew the answer, whether she could have done anything to prevent his death.

As Kaleda was returning home, Gilda Ramos, the Spanish-speaking librarian who had been so instrumental in reaching out to the community, was arriving at work. In the morning, she had watched the news and heard about the killing. In her car, she learned more about the story on the radio. Now she had the victim’s name and a possible motive for the murder: hatred. When she got to the library everyone wanted to know what she, as a Hispanic herself, thought. Ramos gave everyone the same answer: unbelievable.
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She looked for Kaleda but then remembered she was on vacation. She called Kaleda at home and on her cell phone anyway. Just leaving the message made her feel she was accomplishing something. She thought, with sadness, that steps should have been taken earlier to prevent this murder. Her students had told her about the harassment, and what had she done? Nothing other than tell her supervisor, who, she knew, had told the mayor. A meeting had been scheduled, she knew, but now it was too late. Why hadn’t anybody done anything about it? Why did it have to get this far? Now there was a dead man, and the whole country, if not the world, was looking at Patchogue as a place of hatred and intolerance.

Ramos was deep in thought when she saw the mayor approach. Pontieri was upset and worried and wanted to know what to do. What now? Ramos didn’t know, but she told him she would help in any way she could to alleviate fears among Hispanics and to calm everyone else. The scheduled meeting with the community would have to take place, they agreed, but a week later, the following Wednesday, November 19. That would give them enough time to get through the difficult days immediately after
the murder and to pay their respect to the Lucero family. By the way, did anybody know what was happening to the body? Was there a funeral, a Mass, anything planned?

No one knew. It was a tense and confusing Monday.

The next day, county executive Steve Levy called the murder “a one-day story” and added that the killing had received undue attention because he had been very vocal about his views on immigration. The implication was that Lucero’s had been a routine death, if any violent death can be called routine.
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Two days later Levy retracted his words. He wrote a letter to
Newsday,
the local daily, in which he said he had made a mistake. “The horrible incident is indeed more than a one-day story,” he wrote.
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He was right.

On November 12, Wednesday, Mayor Pontieri, accompanied by his wife, went to Gilda Ramos’s evening class for English learners. With Ramos translating his words, he told the students that he was very worried about what had happened and that he would do what he could so that they would never again be afraid to walk the streets of Patchogue. Pontieri hoped that the fifteen students there would begin to spread the word that he cared and that Patchogue was safe.
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Earlier that day, Reverend Wolter was invited to speak at a community event in front of the middle school his son Casey attended. Several civic leaders and elected officials were invited as well, and some were very angry. Levy was not there. Eddington was, and he urged everyone to work together. He conceded that a “terrible incident” had taken place in their midst, but, he said, “Let it not define our county, our community and our town.” He also appealed to the state to be “proactive” and not “reactive” by funding tolerance-focused educational programs in schools and additional social workers. Several others spoke, including Luis Valenzuela, a respected civic leader who was the executive director
of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance.
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