Hunting Season (25 page)

“We are here to help and serve,” Pontieri said, once again relying on Gilda Ramos to translate his words into Spanish. He added that Hispanic immigrants were as important to the community as his own family members were and as his grandparents had been. His grandparents, he emphasized, had come to Patchogue as the Ecuadorians had: without much, but looking for a better life.
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Deputy Inspector Dennis Meehan of the Fifth Precinct, who was transferred to another police precinct shortly after that meeting, told the audience that police wanted to “start now” to create opportunities to have an open dialogue with the community, and he encouraged those present to report incidents of harassment and abuse to police.

At that point, a man who spoke only Spanish said he had been chased, not by young thugs, but by plainclothes officers on a street near his home. They had caught him and beat him, and he had ended up with a broken arm, he said. Meehan seemed to be aware of that case but scolded the man for bringing it up, despite his
opening the door to such reports just a few minutes before.

“This meeting is not the place for this,” Meehan said, firmly ending that line of dialogue.
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Thus, the gathering ended on a confusing note. On the one hand, Pontieri had opened his arms to all with his “we are one community” assertions; on the other hand, a representative from the police said come to us with your complaints, just don’t do it in public, where the media can hear you.

The following day, six of the seven teenagers who had attacked Lucero were arraigned in Suffolk County Criminal Court. They were charged with multiple counts of gang assault and hate crimes, not only for Lucero’s death but also for other assaults prosecutors said they had committed against Hispanics, notably Héctor Sierra and Octavio Cordovo. The judge set bail for five of them at $250,000 cash or $500,000 bond. Chris Overton was denied bail because of his previous felony conviction for the 2007 burglary in East Patchogue.
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The teenagers, one by one, were led to a courtroom, where their parents and high school friends awaited. Lucero’s relatives and friends were also there, and they wept openly as the prosecution laid out the sequence of events that had led to his death.

The seventh defendant, Jeff Conroy, was arraigned the following week and denied bail. He was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter as a hate crime. Conroy was the only one charged with murder because, prosecutors said, the other teenagers did not know he had stabbed Lucero until he told them. Lawyers for the six defendants argued that their clients had been unfairly charged with a crime that others committed, and they took pains to point out that their clients could not possibly be racists because they had friends of all colors and races. To try to prove it, they pointed to the diverse group of young men and women in the courtroom.

All pleaded not guilty, but in the eyes of the prosecutors, the
media, the Ecuadorians in Patchogue, and just about everyone who had been paying attention, they were already guilty. Suffolk County district attorney Thomas J. Spota sounded an ominous note when he spoke at a news conference after the arraignment.

“To them, it was a sport,” he said. “We know for sure that there are more victims out there.”

From the start, Bob Conroy said that the treatment his son and his friends had received from the media was unfair.

“Jeff was ostracized by the press,” he told me the first time we met and every time I saw him after that. “He was used as a poster boy of everything that’s wrong with this country about illegal immigration. It all fell on the back of teenagers, on my son’s back.”
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On November 25, a Manhattan-based advocacy group, Latino Justice/PRLDEF, wrote a letter to the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division asking for an investigation of the Suffolk County police, which, they claimed, systematically violated the rights of Latinos by downplaying or ignoring constant attacks against Hispanics because of their ethnicity.
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That same day, Suffolk police commissioner Richard Dormer announced that he was stripping Fifth Precinct commander Salvatore Manno of his command and appointing a Hispanic, Arístides Mojica, to take over the job. Mojica, who grew up in the South Bronx as the oldest of five in a Puerto Rican family, was the department’s highest-ranking Hispanic member.
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In an interview with
Newsday,
Mojica acknowledged that he faced a serious challenge.

“You can’t assume it’s an anomaly,” he told
Newsday,
speaking about Lucero’s murder. “You can’t assume it will never happen again. You can’t assume that bad behavior is localized to Patchogue.” He promised to earn back the trust of the Latinos in the area.
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To find out just how many silent victims and unreported crimes were out there, Reverend Wolter opened the doors of his church on Main Street on December 3 to Latinos who felt
they had been victims of hate crimes. He invited them to share their stories. Their tales were recorded by a reporter for the public radio station WSHU, an affiliate of National Public Radio. Wolter invited the media, but at least one reporter,
New York Times
editorial writer Lawrence Downes, found the whole thing distasteful. He called it a “guilt fiesta” and questioned whether those who were being interviewed knew that their words were being recorded.

Downes quoted Pontieri, who told him the meeting should have been held in the library, the main gathering place for Patchogue’s Latino population, and without reporters. But Spota, the district attorney, seemed to find the activity fruitful. He told Downes that he saw seventy-five to one hundred people filing through the church to tell their stories, and he was expecting to be able to gather a few useful accounts of unreported assaults.
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In the end, Wolter said, fifty-three people spoke about having been attacked or harassed in Patchogue and other areas nearby. A week or so later, prosecutors showed up at the church with a subpoena for the recordings. They took away all the recordings. Wolter said he felt relieved.
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With so much media attention, people in Patchogue began to feel they were under siege. Reporters just would not go away (three separate documentary crews had started filming almost from the start). Latinos were emboldened, but also scared and outraged. Non-Latinos were defensive, and also scared and outraged. What had happened to their village and when would they get it back? When would things go back to normal? The guilt and the shock took many shapes. County executive Steve Levy, in a surprise statement, referred to Lucero’s assailants as “white supremacists,” without any evidence to support his claim, just as earlier he had described immigration advocates as “communists.”

Michael Mostow, the superintendent of Patchogue-Medford
School District, called the attack “an aberration” and told the press there were no racial issues or divisions in the high school the teenagers attended,
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but Manuel J. Sanzone, the son and grandson of Italian immigrants and the principal of the Patchogue-Medford High School, took precautions nonetheless. He mobilized a mini-lockdown at the school, which meant that backpacks were checked and extra security personnel patrolled the halls. Four days after the murder, he spoke to his students. “I told them that how they handle this, and what they learn from it, becomes a part of their character,” he explained to a
New York Times
reporter, “and that even if they feel afraid for classmates who were involved in it, they should never forget that there was a victim here.”
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About five weeks after Lucero’s death, a school board meeting ended in a shouting match as parents and board members traded insults. At issue was the infamous hallway that housed English-as-a-second-language classrooms. It was here that Hispanic students tended to congregate. A girl who spoke in favor of the ESL classes was booed off the stage and had to leave the meeting.
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The parents of white non-Hispanic students complained that after the murder the hall was “unsafe” for their children, as they, not the Latino students, were now the subject of harassment. But Mostow and other board members said the students themselves had not complained and assured the parents that their children were safe. At that point, a North Patchogue resident named Bill Pearson suggested that perhaps the best solution was to eliminate ESL classes. His suggestion provoked some anger, which led to the shouting match and to Mostow calling Pearson “a racist.” Pearson demanded an apology, but Mostow shouted back, “Not to you, racist!” Pearson told a
Newsday
reporter he planned to contact a lawyer.
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In one of my meetings with Conroy, he mentioned that his daughter too was afraid to walk down the “Spanish” hall.

There were candlelit vigils in the dead of winter for Lucero and a lot of support for his family, while Loja quietly disappeared into the background. Reporters wanted to speak with him, but he shunned them all.

Jack Eddington and others started to organize a community soccer tournament where all ethnicities were invited. The Latino team lost in the first tournament, in 2009, but the event served to build some bridges and it felt good to be playing out in the open. A writer’s workshop promoted writing as a way to fight hate in the community, bringing together Spanish-speaking and English-speaking women who had stories to tell.
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An Ecuadorian filmmaker on Long Island made a short film inspired by the case,
Taught to Hate,
which was shown at the Long Island International Film Expo.
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And a Stony Brook University student won an essay contest for writing an analysis of the articles about Lucero and his killers that appeared in major news publications. He received a full semester’s worth of in-state tuition at the university.
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Diane Berthold, a local designer with myriad health problems but a can-do attitude, began a quilt project. She got together with several other women who also felt the need to create something beautiful and permanent. The Healing Hands & Mending Hearts Quilt Project was born, eventually yielding three quilts from different community groups. The quilts were unveiled in 2010 at the Patchogue American Legion Post.
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Later they were displayed in an empty storefront on South Ocean Avenue, a stone’s throw away from the corner where Jeff and the others were arrested.

The Lucero Foundation was launched to bring Latinos together in Patchogue. It held monthly meetings in an unheated room on the second floor of a building on Main Street. Schools began to offer Spanish-language classes for adults who wanted to learn the language to communicate with their neighbors. And the area where Lucero was killed—at the intersection of Railroad Avenue, Funaro Court, and Sephton Street—was optimistically
and prematurely renamed Unity Place just two months after the Southern Poverty Law Center, an influential civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, released a scathing report titled
Climate of Fear: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y.
The report found that Lucero’s murder was the result of “nativist intolerance and hate violence” that had been festering for years in Suffolk County. In particular, it blamed local officials for fostering such an environment and Steve Levy for minimizing the murder by calling it a “one-day story.”
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The report also detailed thirty-five attacks against Hispanic immigrants in Suffolk County from June 1, 1999, to November 8, 2008. In 2008 alone, at least fourteen immigrants, mostly Ecuadorians, were attacked or harassed in Patchogue.
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Yet few had dared to call the police, for two reasons: they worried about getting deported and they had been told by others who had already been through the same ordeal that the police never did anything because the youths were minors. After Lucero’s murder, and until August 2009, seven other attacks were reported, two of them in Patchogue. The victims of the latter two attacks—two men in one incident and one man in the other—told police that they were attacked by teenagers. At least some of the teenagers told their victims that they wanted “to kill a Hispanic.”
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The Ecuadorian consulate in New York encouraged immigrants to come forward to speak of their abuse and harassment, and hate crime reports increased nearly 30 percent in the county. The consulate also began a program to help Ecuadorians assimilate faster to suburbia, teaching them, among other things, about the illegality of littering and of drinking in public—the very kind of practical education Eddington had long been advocating for.
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In Gualaceo, Doña Rosario told reporters that she would like to come to New York to face her son’s attackers, not to show any hatred—she felt none—but to show them that the man they had killed had a mother who loved him very much.

“I just want to see their faces,” she told
Newsday.
“I don’t want to hurt them. But I want them to see he had a mother here waiting for him. I want them to put their hand on my heart and feel the enormous damage they have caused this family.”
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