Hunting Season (31 page)

Another village resident sent a succinct e-mail: “We live in AMERICA NOT IN MEXICO.” Yet another wrote: “It seems that the only reason the PM Library exists is to assist these ‘hard-working undocumented immigrants.’ I choose to call them what they really are CRIMINALS.” And another: “Step outside the door of your Library. Notice that smell in the air, no not the beans and rice or the beer or the stink of urine, it is the smell of change.”

In January 2011, a seemingly very angry patron sent an e-mail that ended with the following sentences: “I am sick and tired of you feeding these stray cats. Send them back where they belong. Perhaps you people could move to El Salvador or Mexico.”

Kaleda, who has expanded the programs to reach even more Hispanics, says that she often engages in conversations with patrons who don’t like the library’s Spanish-language services. She tries to appease them by explaining that the community is changing and that recognizing that change can be painful. Dina Chrils, the director of the library, sends everyone the same response: “Thank you for your input. We will keep it in mind when planning Library Services.”
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The Reverend Dwight Wolter, who had wanted to reach out to the Latino community ever since he arrived in Patchogue, finally found an ingenious way to do so. He gives away new and used bicycles to anyone who needs transportation and can’t afford wheels. But he drew the ire of an important segment of the Latino community when he announced in July 2010 that he would begin
collecting money to contribute to Jeffrey Conroy’s commissary account in prison. Eddington too provoked much criticism when he and his wife, Patricia, an elected official, each sent a letter to Judge Doyle asking him for clemency in sentencing Jeff. Eddington wrote that the killing was “deplorable” and needed to be punished, but he added, “I have to believe that, for a young man raised in such a family, redemption is possible.”
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The day Jeff was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, his father lost his composure in a heartbreaking scene that left no doubt what the true outcome of the case was. Eight families were shattered. “He was fucking seventeen!” Bob Conroy yelled the moment Judge Doyle issued his sentence. From his seat, next to his lawyer, Jeff paled and looked pained. His sister in the audience began sobbing. “You think this is mercy, for crying out loud? Jesus fucking Christ!” Conroy started walking toward the door as he yelled at the judge. The courtroom was quiet, as people sat in the benches, twisting their bodies to get a better view but not daring to say a word. Conroy banged on the door on his way out, already surrounded by police officers. His children followed him quietly as Jeff was escorted out of the courtroom and the judge, impassively, returned to his reading of the sentence. The family vowed to appeal.

Broke after his son’s trial, Conroy turned to the Legal Aid Society in Suffolk County for help. A lawyer there, John Dowden, argued the appeal on December 7, 2012, more than two years after the trial. He presented a brief with eleven points that, he said, would merit a retrial. Dowden argued that Jeff was denied his right to a fair trial when the court failed to respond meaningfully to a juror note requesting a read-back of the cross-examination of Detective McLeer, and that the judge had erred when he instructed the jury to regard Jeff’s statement regarding the culpability of Chris not as a fact but as a comment that reflected Jeff’s state of mind. Dowden also argued that the sentence imposed on
Jeff was harsh and excessive and that it should be modified in the interest of justice.
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But Dowden lost his argument and the court confirmed the conviction. Though the Conroys still have the option of going before the New York Court of Appeals and beyond, Jeff is likely to remain imprisoned at least until he’s eligible for parole in 2030, the year he will turn thirty-nine.

To this day, Conroy remains aggrieved by the sentence. Jeff is held at the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison built in 1844 that houses about twenty-seven hundred men in Dannemora, a village 365 miles from Medford.
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Conroy visits him as often as he can, which is not very often, because it’s a long trip and gasoline is expensive, but father and son talk on the phone often and Jeff writes from prison. A
Wikipedia
entry for the prison lists Jeff among the many “notable inmates” who have done their time at Clinton. It breaks Conroy’s already pained and fragile heart to know that his son lives with some of the most hardened criminals in the state, including Joel Rifkin, a serial killer serving a 203-year sentence. “He’s surrounded by bad men,” he told me once and complained about how Jeff had begun cursing a great deal.

Conroy has had several recent health scares but tries to remain strong, the head of a household that has changed dramatically since Jeff was arrested. Now separated from his wife, he lives with three of his children in the same house where Jeff grew up. The last time I visited, the house was in much better shape than when we first met right after the trial. The grass was green and lush; there were potted flowers, and the place had a sense of order and normalcy.

In a brief exchange of text messages in early 2013, Conroy wrote me: “It is just totally wrong how they made him the county’s scapegoat. I don’t know if that’s how you feel. But 25 years is bullshit.” Then he asked me how I felt, if I thought that justice was served by sentencing a seventeen-year-old to such a long prison
term. I told him the truth: I don’t know. Because even after three years of reporting and writing this book, there is a lot I will never know.

What I think I do know is that Jeffrey Conroy didn’t set out to kill anybody that night. I also know that the atmosphere that existed in Suffolk County in the first decade of the century would have made an unequivocal impression on any youngster: Jeff and his friends must have felt that their entertainment of hunting “beaners” had the tacit and implicit approval of the adults in their world.

A recent national study shows that a large number of Americans, influenced by negative images in the media, hold unfavorable and even hostile views of Hispanics. According to the study, conducted by the National Hispanic Media Coalition, many Americans hold the media stereotype of Latinos largely as maids, gardeners, dropouts, and criminals. At least a third of non-Hispanic Americans believe that half or more of the nation’s almost fifty-six million Hispanics are undocumented immigrants with large families and little education.
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On the fourth anniversary of Lucero’s death, a vigil was held in a Methodist church in Patchogue. About seventy-five people attended the November 25, 2012, event, including Mayor Pontieri. A large photo of Lucero in rust-colored overalls was placed at the altar, and it seemed to loom over the audience. The friendship quilts the women of Medford and Patchogue had painstakingly made hung in the back.

Before the event started, Bob Conroy drove by the church and called Joselo Lucero to his car. Neither one of them wanted to describe to me what transpired, but someone who is close to both men and was standing by heard Conroy apologize. His gesture is not surprising. Conroy had apologized at least twice before, including once during a pretrial hearing when he shook Joselo’s
hand.
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The day of the fourth-anniversary vigil, Conroy took his apology a step further and asked Joselo if he could come into the church. Joselo told him that the event was open to all. But Conroy drove away. He said he didn’t want to attract attention to himself on such a solemn occasion. Joselo was left a little shaken by the unexpected encounter but quickly recovered.

Inside the church, near the altar, there were yellow, red, and orange flowers. A man, accompanied by his own guitar playing, sang a song about the difficulties in attaining the American dream. “Here I am, after ten years, living in the United States, without papers. I’m still illegal,” he sang. A local woman read a long poem she had written about the trial of Jeffrey Conroy, which she called “In the Courtroom,” and then Joselo, wearing a camel-colored suit and a white shirt, took the microphone.

“I don’t know what to say,” he began, and then, of course, he had plenty to say, because in the years since his brother’s death, Joselo has blossomed into a public figure, a young man who wears dark shades to hide his sad eyes and who makes forceful statements in his still tentative but improving English. Joselo has moved from Patchogue and now works as outreach coordinator at the Hagedorn Foundation—a nonprofit organization based on Long Island that supports and promotes social equality. Frequently he speaks to college and high school students, and he participates in symposiums, conferences, and television programs about hate crimes and immigration. His attire has improved—he no longer wears baseball caps to public events—but he retains his shy smile and his inbred politeness.

That day, in front of the altar, he talked about Sandy, the superstorm that had just swept over the Northeast killing 149 people, 42 of them in New York alone. Lucero linked that tragedy to the plight of immigrants.

“Immigrants are the ones who will be rebuilding after Sandy,” he said. “The day laborers are the ones who will rebuild the homes
that keep you warm.”

He was right. Five weeks after Sandy, the
New York Times
reported that day laborers were working seven days a week rebuilding homes destroyed by Sandy. One of the workers interviewed for the article said the sudden infusion of money had allowed him to buy a computer, bicycles, and new shoes for his two sons in Ecuador.
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In Patchogue, there was little damage from the storm. Water rose approximately four feet deep in many homes along the shore, trees were down, and people lost power, but most neighborhoods had their electricity back on in seventy-two hours. Some houses need major reconstruction work, but no one was left homeless, Pontieri said.

“Like most things in Patchogue, its past is what saved it from the ravages of today,” Pontieri told me, explaining that in the early 1950s, the mayor at the time, George Lechtrecker, had created a thirty-acre park on the waterfront. It was that park that protected and buffered most homes from the serious damage that other Long Island communities suffered during the 2012 storm.
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The past also helped Patchogue survive the killing of Lucero, Pontieri insisted, because the village is and always has been an immigrant enclave. The faces and the languages have changed but the ethos is the same: newcomers trying to find in pretty and orderly suburbia their own little piece of heaven.

Pontieri may be right. How do immigrants find their way to suburbia if not following those who came before they did? How do parents ever recuperate from the grave mistakes of their children? How does anyone account for the capriciousness of wind and rising water? Superstorm Sandy, like all major weather systems, had a mind of its own. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew ravaged portions of South Florida, leaving others untouched. I remember walking around a doomed neighborhood called Country Walk in Dade County and finding one solitary pale green wall standing
amid total devastation. There were pictures of smiling children with braces on the wall, and reclining against it, an elegant table with a set of glasses and a bottle of liquor. Intact.

Perhaps Sandy spared Patchogue because the park barrier built fifty years earlier did what it was supposed to do. Or perhaps Sandy, with a mind of its own, spared Patchogue because the village had had enough.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I could not have written this book without the goodwill and cooperation of the men and women in Patchogue and in Gualaceo who sat with me for extensive rounds of interviews and conversations or answered my phone calls and e-mails on numerous occasions during three years. Most of them are cited throughout the book, as this is their story, not mine, but I want to thank them here, because without their help I would have had nothing more than a good idea. In no particular order, they are Jean Kaleda, Gilda Ramos, Mayor Paul Pontieri, the Reverend Dwight Wolter, Angel Loja, Jack Eddington, Ambassador Jorge López Amaya, Julio Espinoza and his family, Pamela Suárez, Rabbi Joel Levinson, Hans Henke, Diana M. Berthold, Megan O’Donnell, Detective Lola Quesada, Michael Mostow, Martha Vázquez, Joselo Lucero and his family, Macedonio Ayala, Denise Overton, Mayor Marco Tapia, Father Julio Castillo, and Bob Conroy.

I relied a great deal on the good journalism of reporters who got to the story before I did, chiefly Angel Canales, Tamara Bock, Jennifer Jo Janisch, Ted Hesson, Sumathi Reddy, Margaret
(Molly) Altizer, and Bart Jones. Angel and Tamara generously shared the transcripts of their documentary,
Running Wild: Hate and Immigration on Long Island.
Ted and Sumathi not only shared their notes, expertise, and friendship, but they also drove me to and from the courthouse in Riverhead too many times to count. Ted, Bart, and Molly also read the manuscript; Molly especially made numerous and terrific comments that improved the book immensely.

Gretchen Van Dyck and Ray Katz assisted me during the early stages of research. Their help tracking down trial documents and researching the history of hate in America was an essential building block to my own reporting and writing. Michael Sorrentino, Sarah Hartmann, and Mark Nolan helped me understand Patchogue better. Fernando León, Marlene Matute, William Murillo, and Andrea Ledesma did the same in Gualaceo. I’m eternally grateful for their generosity of spirit and camaraderie.

Court reporter Dana Marconi worked diligently to get me the trial transcripts I needed, often on deadline. Michael Lieberman of the Anti-Defamation League patiently helped me understand the intricacies of hate crime laws. Laura Itzkowitz took charge of the monumental task of organizing the book’s references, and she did so with grace and calm despite a punishing deadline. Ambassador Gonzalo Andrade graciously agreed to read the sections of the manuscript that deal with the recent history of Ecuador and made available important research regarding Ecuadorian emigration. And S. Mitra Kalita, over lunch one day, said the words that unlocked the writing of this book.