by Mirta Ojito
It isn’t difficult to imagine how a child might have internalized the events that were happening a few blocks from his home, right outside the local 7-Eleven where his parents stopped to buy Coke, gum, or a lottery ticket. In a child’s imagination, the crimes could easily get confused. Who were the criminals and who were the victims here?
On July 5, 2003, sometime during the night, five white teenagers in Farmingville threw a firebomb at the house of a Mexican family.19 The family escaped but the hatred did not. It stayed in Suffolk County, barely hidden, gathering strength, festering. Five years later all of that hatred would finally culminate in a murder committed by seven teenagers who grew up with the turmoil of Farmingville as background noise.
The rhetoric of groups such as Sachem Quality of Life was not unlike the steady anti-immigration diet the rest of America was receiving, particularly on television programs such as Lou Dobbs Tonight on CNN. Dobbs, who boasted of receiving two thousand e-mails a day—not all of them congratulatory—unleashed a campaign against undocumented immigrants, whom he repeatedly and with apparent relish called “illegal aliens,” that lasted more than six years.
Reporters on his show filed stories, such as the one that aired November 4, 2006, highlighting the amount of money “illegal aliens” were costing the government: $12 billion in primary and secondary education, $17 billion for the education of so-called anchor babies—the US-born children of undocumented parents—and $1 billion to reimburse hospitals for the care of undocumented immigrants, they claimed. The report ended with a somber Dobbs stating that the issue of “illegal aliens” was “a problem that is certainly not going to go away.”
On his program he often claimed to be pro-immigration, but against illegal immigration. He advocated for a fence between the United States and Mexico and called the daily arrival of undocumented immigrants “an invasion.” They used “illegal benefits,” he claimed, and undercut jobs that should go to the less-educated US citizens. He blamed undocumented immigrants for crowding schools and using taxpayers’ money to get free health care and education for their children, services that they could not receive in their own countries.
While immigrants do come to the United States for opportunities that are unavailable in their home countries, Dobbs’s tone communicated a sense of urgency and danger: Mexicans were a problem, a nuisance, a pest. Once, he went as far as to link undocumented immigrants to a spike in the number of leprosy cases in the United States. Later a 60 Minutes piece proved him wrong.20
Dobbs wasn’t alone in his relentless criticism of undocumented immigrants. From his perch at Fox News, Bill O’Reilly expounded nightly on the evils of illegal immigrants, at least once engaging in a shouting match with a guest, veteran television journalist Geraldo Rivera, over whether or not the immigration status of a drunk driver who killed a young woman in Virginia was relevant. While the men sparred, viewers saw text moving slowly through the frame below their images: “Daughter Killed by Illegal Alien.” For Rivera, the issue was about drunk driving. O’Reilly insisted the driver should have never been in the country to begin with. Rivera asked him if he wanted to start a mob scene. “Do you want your viewers to go knocking on people’s doors and ask them, ‘Are you illegal? I want to take you outside and do something to you.’ ” He went on, “History has seen what happens when you single out people like that.”21
On another occasion O’Reilly talked about a man from Houston who had shot and killed two men who were burglarizing his neighbor’s house. The discussion centered on the burglars’ immigration status instead of on the fact that the man had left the safety of his house to hunt down and kill two immigrants who were not endangering his life. “Talking Point says, ‘Enough is enough,’ ” O’Reilly said, looking squarely into the camera.22
In 2006, Patrick J. Buchanan published State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, which quickly became a New York Times best seller. From the prologue on, Buchanan’s book is a frontal attack against immigrants, particularly Hispanics:
In 1960, there were perhaps 5 million Asians and Hispanics in the United States. Today, there are 57 million. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of all Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean peoples have moved into the United States. One to 2 million enter every year and stay, half of them in defiance of America’s laws and disdain for America’s borders. No one knows how many illegal aliens are here. The estimates run from 12 to 20 million.
This is not immigration as America knew it, when men and women made a conscious choice to turn their backs on their native lands and cross the ocean to become Americans. This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history.23
The United States, he went on, was being destroyed by Mexican invaders.
Samuel P. Huntington struck a similar note in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, published in 2004. “In the contemporary world,” he wrote, “the greatest threat to the societal security of nations comes from immigration.”24 One solution, he claimed, was to strive for assimilation, but there was a problem. “Assimilation is particularly problematic for Mexicans and other Hispanics,” he declared.25
The word “invasion” became part of the discourse, and the ominous threat of this very visible “invasion” didn’t escape those who had absconded to suburbia behind their proverbial white picket fences. While most of these fences were metaphorical, real white fences had been erected in part to keep strangers away, unless the strangers happened to be mowing the lawn at a really cheap rate.
Though immigrants were not new to Patchogue and the surrounding towns, few people there have the personal experiences—such as Pontieri’s—or the historical memory or the intellectual curiosity to know that. Many residents felt having immigrants so close to them was an aberration, a troublesome issue they thought they had left behind in the city, along with overcrowded public schools and tiny, overpriced apartments. Many in Suffolk County trace their ancestry to immigrants from Ireland and Italy, but their links to the past are weak. Practically no one speaks Italian anymore, and, like Pontieri, they are more likely to have visited Cancún than Calabria.
The disconnect comes, in part, because of the way immigration patterns changed in the United States in the second decade of the twentieth century, when the government restricted the flow of immigrants from countries such as Italy, Germany, and Ireland. The other notable change regarding immigration took place when President Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 into law, prioritizing family reunification. By then the pattern of immigration had changed, as Europe had found its footing and eastern Europe was under the control of the Soviet Union, allowing virtually no migration to the United States.
Immigrants from Latin America and Asia stepped into that void. Many of them were coming from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Ecuador, and other countries of South and Central America. And when they did, they often found their way to suburbia, which had remained mostly white, middle-class enclaves for decades.
The movement of immigrants to suburbia caught many by surprise—sociologists, demographers, and suburban dwellers alike. Previous generations of immigrants had viewed suburbia as the culmination of their American dream and worked hard in overcrowded cities, enduring all kinds of discomfort and penury while saving for their ticket to places such as Patchogue or Farmingville. But as cities lost manufacturing jobs to a changing economy, the immigrant experience changed as well: the suburbs became the beginning of the journey for many who simply bypassed the city experience and moved straight to suburbia.26
In the mid-1990s, the influx of immigrants was noticeable in the suburbs of New York, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. So many were settling there, in fact, that the authorities began to wonder publicly how to meet their needs and who would pay for it. That was precisely the issue in Suffolk County: how to deal with a growing number of newcomers looking for jobs, housing, schools, health care, and language training while maintaining the illusion of suburbia. H
ow do you reconcile the fact that the city’s issues have followed you to the front yard across the way, where your kind elderly neighbor used to live and now five men share a split-level home and park their unsightly trucks in the streets where your children play ball? What to do about the new neighbors who don’t understand or don’t know what days they should get the garbage out and place it curbside? Why do they have to play volleyball so late at night? And why, above all, don’t they speak English already?
These are not easy questions, and the answers are even more difficult to fathom because, beginning in the 1990s, the United States began receiving an ever increasing number of undocumented immigrants. In the absence of clear laws from Washington, local governments tried to exert some form of control over immigration. Lawmakers who couldn’t alter or make federal policy started to do what they could to protect the interests of their voters and keep undocumented immigrants out of Long Island. In Suffolk County, where homeowners pay some of the highest taxes in the country, that meant legislators were pressed to protect property values. No one would want to buy a house next to one occupied by a dozen foreigners who failed to keep their own lawn under control.
In September 2000, the Suffolk County legislature narrowly voted down a proposal to file a lawsuit to get the federal government to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. By then the town of Brookhaven had passed a law limiting the number of people who could occupy a rental house.27
County legislators and other officials, attuned to their voters and neighbors or perhaps acting out of their own impulses and biases, fueled the arguments by making inappropriate and violent statements. In August 2001, county legislator Michael D’Andre of Smithtown warned during a public hearing on immigration that if his own town should ever experience an influx of Latino day laborers like that of nearby communities, they would be “up in arms; we’ll be out with baseball bats.”28
In 2006, a school board member in the Hamptons distributed an online petition to parents, teachers, and a school principal to try to prevent undocumented immigrants from receiving any “free services.” That same year, the same official sent an e-mail with a description of a doll called Brentwood Barbie: “This Spanish-speaking only Barbie comes with a 1984 Toyota with expired temporary plates & 4 baby Barbies in the backseat (no car seats). The optional Ken doll comes with a paint bucket lunch pail & is missing 3 fingers on his left hand. Green cards are not available for Brentwood Barbie or Ken.”29
In March 2007, county legislator Elie Mystal of Amityville, also on Long Island, said of Latino immigrants waiting for work on street corners, “If I’m living in a neighborhood and people are gathering like that, I would load my gun and start shooting, period. Nobody will say it, but I’m going to say it.”30
That same year during a public hearing, county legislator Jack Eddington asked two immigration advocates who were speaking from the podium if they were in the country legally. Eddington also issued a warning to all undocumented immigrants. “You better beware,” he said. “Suffolk County residents will not be victimized anymore.”31
The spotlight was on the county’s top legislator, Suffolk County executive Steve Levy, elected in 2003, whose job was to set the agenda for local government throughout the county. Among other things, upon taking office Levy proposed that Suffolk County police officers act as immigration agents and detain undocumented immigrants. He called for routine checks on the immigration status of all foreign-born people detained by the police and defended housing evictions for overcrowding. In one month alone, June 2005, he oversaw raids on eleven houses in Farmingville. He demanded increased federal support against “illegals,” and, in a 2006 forum, he said that women who crossed the border pregnant wanted to give birth in the United States so their American-citizen children could become “anchor babies” to help their families legalize their status.32
When activists demonstrated against hate crime violence and the selective enforcement of zoning laws which led to the mass eviction of Latino residents from their rented homes, Levy stated, “I will not back down to this one percent lunatic fringe. They evidently do not like me much because I am one of the few officials who are not intimidated by their politically correct histrionics.”33
Reelection in 2007, with 96 percent of the vote, further emboldened him.29 In an interview with the New York Times that year about his drive to push undocumented immigrants out of Suffolk County, he said, “People who play by the rules work hard to achieve the suburban dream of the white picket fence. If you live in the suburbs, you do not want to live across the street from a house where 60 men live. You do not want trucks riding up and down the block at 5 a.m., picking up workers.”34
Like many others in the county, Paul Pontieri was concerned about overcrowding in homes with absent landlords. To that end, the village began to issue citations against those who violated ordinances. Pontieri thought the solution was to focus on ordinance violations—particularly excessive noise and overcrowding—and enforce the law, regardless of who lived in a house and who owned it. In six years, from 2004 to 2010, the village evicted people from about fourteen dwellings. At least half were occupied by Latino residents.
Pontieri was also worried about the rhetoric flowing down from Steve Levy’s office and others in Albany. As he understood the concept of leadership, leaders led by example and conviction but also with empathy and humility. Near his desk he kept a framed poster of his favorite Robert Kennedy quote: “The task of leadership, the first task of concerned people, is not to condemn or castigate or deplore; it is to search out the reason for disillusionment and alienation, the rationale of protest and dissent—perhaps, indeed, to learn from it.”
That was Pontieri’s mood the day he received the call from Jean Kaleda—concerned but optimistic. He agreed to go to the library to meet with immigrants, hoping to allay their fears, on Wednesday, November 12. The meeting was set for 7:00 p.m., in conjunction with a regularly scheduled ESL class. Kaleda would organize the meeting and Gilda Ramos would translate. Pontieri wrote it in his calendar and then called the public safety department and ordered that an officer (one of the retired police officers who worked as unarmed constables for the village) be sent to patrol the library at night.
The officer, though unarmed, would deter any further harassment, Pontieri hoped. The meeting would both inform him and show the community he was taking action. Pontieri was pleased with how he had handled the call.
The meeting took place, but not as scheduled. It was not the kind of meeting that either Kaleda or Pontieri had envisioned.
CHAPTER 5
BEANER JUMPING
Christopher “Chris” Overton was at home, eating pizza with his mom and his younger brother Dylan, when the phone rang. José Pacheco was on the line. José was a new friend, a classmate from Patchogue-Medford High School, the school that Chris was finally attending after two years of being homeschooled. At sixteen and in eleventh grade, he was eager for social contact and friends. He had begged his parents to find him a high school that would take him, one where he could play basketball, which, along with girls, was his passion.1
Chris was banned from attending his previous school, Bellport High, because two years earlier, at fourteen, he had participated in a home burglary in East Patchogue with older teens. In the break-in, the homeowner had been shot and killed, but Chris, who later told his parents he had had no idea that anyone was armed, was treated as a youth offender and sent home to wait for a probation hearing.
He was still waiting for the hearing when the phone rang just after 7:30 p.m. on November 8, 2008, and José urged him to join him at the home of a mutual friend, Alyssa Sprague. Chris knew Alyssa from his previous high school. Bellport kids rarely mingled with kids from Patchogue and Medford, but sometimes, like this night, they found connections in their various social circles. Patchogue, East Patchogue, Medford, Bellport, and Farmingville are within minutes of each other.
That night was one of those times when a gathering occurs somewhat
serendipitously: a mixture of old and new friendships, coincidences, and a dose of luck. In this case, really bad luck. By the end of the night, a man would lie bleeding to death near the train tracks in Patchogue and seven teenagers would be pressing their backs against the wall of a realtor’s office—the one that looked like an old fishing supplies store, the one they had walked by hundreds of times and used as a meeting point with friends—as a cop frisked them and searched their pockets, looking for the knife that one of them had just plunged into the man’s chest.
Chris was just getting over a bout of bronchitis and wasn’t sure he wanted to go out. José mentioned that his friend Jeff Conroy, a wrestler who also played lacrosse and football, was there as well. Chris, who was into basketball, wasn’t impressed and hung up, uncommitted. But his mother, Denise Overton, thought it would do him good to meet other jocks. I’ll take you, she told him.
After José called a second time that evening, Chris said yes, he would join them at Alyssa’s house. His mother drove him, but before they arrived José called a third time. The group had moved on; they were now hanging out outside a Stop & Shop in Medford, where Jeff lived.
Overton didn’t relish the idea of her son “hanging out,” so she took him to the store and gave him thirty minutes while she ran some errands. José walked over to the car to greet Chris and they left. Twenty minutes later, Overton texted her son. All was well, he replied, but shortly after that, in typical teenage fashion, the group was on the move again. Chris called his mother and said they were going to Jeff’s house.
