by Mirta Ojito
Okay, said Overton. Let me speak with his father when you get there.
Chris did just that. The elder Conroy came to the phone and said the boys were watching TV in the basement. It was all peaceful and normal, he assured her. They do it every weekend, he said.
All right, Overton agreed. I’ll pick him up at eleven, she said and hung up, feeling relieved that her son was finally mingling with kids from his new school. Overton stayed home watching television herself, but soon started to nod off. At ten twenty, she called Chris and told him she was on her way, but he begged for more time, explaining that more people had come over and they were having too good of a time to leave.
Overton assumed he was still at Jeff’s house, watching TV. Okay, stay, she said. Your father will pick you up on his way home from work at one thirty. Chris’s father, Warren Overton, worked security at a nearby club.
By the time the elder Overton called his wife to tell her he couldn’t reach their son by phone, it was close to 2:00 a.m. and Chris was far from the Conroy house. In fact, he had left Jeff’s house almost as soon as his mother had hung up the phone after promising to come back for him at eleven. His parents wouldn’t learn about that until much later, after their son had been arrested and charged with a crime his family was sure he couldn’t have committed.2
Jeffrey “Jeff” Conroy, seventeen and a senior, had gone to Alyssa’s house that night with José to have dinner, but the two left half an hour after they arrived, because Jeff had gotten the feeling that Alyssa’s mother didn’t like seeing him around her daughter. He and José had walked over to the Stop & Shop, a five-minute walk, to wait for Chris and later for Jeff’s father who picked them up. Conroy took them home where they ate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and hung out for a few minutes. It was getting colder, so Jeff put on his Patchogue-Medford Raiders basketball sweatshirt before heading out the door. The teenagers walked to the Medford train station a few blocks away. This time Chris didn’t call his mother to alert her of the changing plans.3
Several friends were at the train station when Jeff arrived with José and Chris. They were Jordan Dasch, Nicholas “Nicky” (or “Nick”) Hausch, Kevin “Kuvan” Shea, Anthony Hartford, Michelle Cassidy, Nicole Tesoriero, and Felicia Hollman. Jeff knew them all from school. They had beers. Nick was carrying his BB gun.
The Medford train station is a two-level Plexiglas structure painted in neutral colors. Penn Station in Manhattan is only 55.9 miles away, but the Medford station belongs to a world so different from the city that it almost seems located in another country. In Medford there is very little for bored, restless teenagers to do on a Saturday night. They can get together at a friend’s house or a mall—or, as it happened this night, the platform of a train station. As Jeff later told his lawyer, the station was “just somewhere to go.”
Jeff, José, and Chris climbed a flight of stairs and sat on the platform with the others, where Jeff, after a beer or two, began playing with Felicia. He lifted her up and spun her around, and, when he put her down, cut his left thumb, which bled. No one had a Band-Aid or a tissue, but Michelle gave him a tampon to stanch the blood.
More people arrived: Matt Rivera, Frank Grillo, Jason Eberhardt, and Jason Moran. The playful banter continued and Jeff started wrestling with José. Then Nick and Kuvan fired at a ticket machine with the BB gun. An alarm went off and the group scattered quickly before the cops arrived.
They all crammed into two cars. Jeff, José, and Chris rode in Jordan’s SUV, along with Anthony, Kuvan, Nicky, and the three girls. The others left in Jason’s car. As they drove aimlessly, a little drunk and in fear, they decided to go to nearby Southaven County Park, where many of them had played as children. Of all the kids in the park that night, Jeff was closest to José and Kuvan.
Kuvan, seventeen, lived in Medford with his father, his father’s girlfriend, her daughter, his two brothers, and the girlfriend of one of the brothers. He did not think of himself as racist. “I just like to fight,” he would later tell investigators. José, seventeen, who is half black and half Puerto Rican, lived with his mother in Patchogue. By all accounts he was popular and outgoing.
Individually they all seemed like average teenagers. Anthony, seventeen, lived in Medford with his mother, three siblings, an uncle, and a grandfather. Nick too was seventeen and lived in Medford with his parents and five siblings. Jordan, another seventeen-year-old Medford resident, told police during his confession that he did not drink that night because he was driving, and he didn’t fight because he had had back surgery the year before and didn’t want to injure himself.
Aneesha, a classmate who was particularly close to Kuvan, Anthony, José, and Jeff, described them to a reporter as “sweet,” “fun,” and “great.” She called José a “comedian” because he was always making them laugh. She said she loved them all.
“Like I used to talk to them about, like, my problems and they would tell me, like ‘Eesha, don’t worry about it.’ They would give me good advice, like what to do. Every time I needed someone to talk to, they were always there,” she said.4
Jeff Conroy shouldn’t have been at the park that night. It was his friend Nick Cleary’s birthday and he was supposed to spend the night at the Clearys’, along with Nick’s cousins and brothers and Jeff’s best friend, Keith Brunjes. Jeff’s father, in fact, thought that his son was headed to the birthday party when he left home. Jeff was going to call him when he arrived, but the call never came and Conroy didn’t notice: he had fallen asleep on his couch.
At the park, by the semi-dark basketball courts, the teenagers sat around, killing time and drinking. Then, about half an hour after they arrived, Anthony had an idea. “Let’s go fuck up some Mexicans,” he told Jeff and Michelle when the others were about twenty feet away. Michelle wanted no part of that. “No, chill,” she counseled Jeff. “Don’t go with them. I don’t want you getting in trouble.”
But some of the boys liked the idea, and about ten minutes later they left. Kuvan, Anthony, Nick, Jordan, José, Chris, and Jeff got in one car. Seven of them. Later they would come to be known as the “Patchogue 7,” a name that some of their parents have objected to because it made them sound like a gang. Although they all got in the car voluntarily, it’s still unclear how many of them knew exactly what they were going to do or where they were headed. At least two would later say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. All they had wanted, they insisted, was a ride home.
Later too it would become clear that for some of them attacking Hispanics had become a sport. It has been established that when Nick announced a destination—“Let’s go to Patchogue because there’s a lot of Spanish people over there”—no one asked to be let out of the car.
On they went. On their way to Patchogue hunting for Hispanics. “Let’s go! Let’s beat up some beaners!” Nick yelled. Everyone laughed. That’s when Chris, his mother says, learned that among his new friends, Mexicans—and, by extension, all Hispanic immigrants—were called “beaners.” As in rice and beans, the same food staple that years earlier had so offended the mayor of Haverstraw.
Those who write about hate are in agreement: hate crimes are not usually committed by members of well-known racist organizations. Instead, perpetrators tend to be unremarkable types, including bored teenagers looking to show off in front of their friends. Hate crimes tend to be excessively brutal and random—the perpetrators often attack total strangers—and are usually committed by a group, seldom by a lone attacker.5
When Anthony blurted out his entertainment idea for the night, “Let’s go fuck up some Mexicans,” and the others agreed to go along with it (or at least said nothing), everyone was acting in concert with generally accepted theories on why and how hate crimes take place, and why groups of teenagers—some of whom may not have been known as racists before—are often perpetrators.
“Clearly, there is safety in numbers,” write Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt in Hate Crimes Revisited: America’s War on Those Who Are Different.
In a grou
p, the hatemongers who instigate an altercation believe that they are less likely to be hurt because they have their friends to protect them. The group also grants a certain degree of anonymity. If everyone participated, then no one person can easily be singled out as bearing primary responsibility for the attack. Because they share the blame, it is diluted or weakened. Finally, the group gives its members a dose of psychological support for their blatant bigotry. Feeding initially on the hatred of one or a few peers, escalation becomes a game in which members of the group incite one another toward ever increasing levels of violence. To do his part and “prove himself,” therefore, each offender feels that he must surpass the previous atrocity.6
The authors further explain that “many who commit hate crimes are at the margin of their community. They may have dropped out of school either spiritually or physically and see little likelihood of ever making it in terms of the American success ethic.”7
All the young people in the car that night were in school, but Levin and McDevitt could have been referring to Jeffrey Conroy when they talked about the “spiritual” withdrawal. Between 2006 and 2008, he accumulated twenty-four incidents documented in his school’s disciplinary record. He was subject to detentions, in-school suspensions, and multiday out-of-school suspensions for infractions that ranged from being late to insubordination, disorderly conduct, disruptive behavior, using foul language toward teachers, and skipping classes. He had also cursed at a coach and a security officer at a high school football game and later admitted he had been drunk.8
It had not always been like this, and it is not how his father saw his oldest son, or how others, including his longtime Latina girlfriend, remember Jeff.
Jeffrey Conroy, the first boy and the second of four children born to Robert “Bob” Conroy and Lori Conroy, had a thoroughly modern—and white American—family tree. His ancestors came from Poland and Ireland on his father’s side, and from Italy and Germany on his mother’s side.9
Jeff also has an older sister, living in California, who is his father’s daughter from an early marriage that ended in divorce decades ago, and another, younger sister, who is his mother’s biological daughter but not his father’s. The Conroys live in a small, modest home in Medford, a solidly middle-class town with none of the charm of Patchogue. Unlike the houses in the village, which can be large, multistoried, and colorful, with flowering lawns and inviting porches—some resemble Victorian bed-and-breakfasts—most houses in Medford are ranch-style, split-level, functional, and uninspiring.
The Conroys’ house had been a wedding gift from Lori’s mother. When I visited for the first time, the front lawn was in disarray, with dry grass and debris from old toys and cars dotting the driveway. Near the front door was a faded and peeling garden ornament of a sleeping man with a large sombrero, atop a burro, the stereotypical portrayal of a Mexican at rest. Two large dogs roamed freely through the green-carpeted living room, where the walls are canvases for family portraits and the school pictures of every year for every child in the family. Jeff’s room was off the small living room, and its every flat surface was covered with shiny trophies. A promising wrestler, he also played football, and his father said he excelled at lacrosse. He dreamed of playing midfield on a lacrosse team for a state university, either Albany or Platts-burgh, the latter in the northern reaches of New York.
“I knew he would be famous one day, but not for this,” Bob Conroy told me during my initial conversation with him in December 2010. “I used to think he would go to college on a lacrosse scholarship and become a phys ed teacher, and get married, and settle in a house not far from ours.”
Tall and muscular, with a chiseled face and buzz cut, Jeff was popular with the girls. On and off, he had been dating Pamela Suárez since the two had been fourteen years old. Pamela, who was born in Bolivia, is a beauty with two birthmarks on her face, tiny hands and straight, white teeth framed by shapely lips. She says she fell in love with Jeff the moment she saw him in seventh grade. She went home and told her mother, Mom, I think I’m in love. That feeling, Pamela noted in June 2011, seven years after that meeting, never subsided.10
By eighth grade, they were seriously dating. Jeff played football; she was a cheerleader. In tenth grade they broke up, but got back together in eleventh grade, though the relationship was rocky that year. “Too many girls in his life,” Pamela says sweetly, tears bordering her eyes. “I wanted no part of that.” But they remained friends. In many ways, Pamela says, Jeff was a typical suburban teenager. He smoked pot, drank, and hung out with friends at the mall. At her eighteenth birthday party, in her house, he got so drunk that she had to help carry him to a car that would take him home. But he could also be a sweet young man, who dreamed of having three children with her, and who was very close to his family—especially his father and his little sister. He listened to hip-hop, loved rap and Daddy Yankee, and hated country music. They went to the movies all the time, Pamela said, and he preferred comedies like Failure to Launch, a 2006 romantic comedy about a thirtysomething man who would not leave his parents’ home. During The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a 2005 horror movie she insisted they go to, “he was so scared, he wouldn’t let go of my hand,” Pamela recalled.
Conroy says Jeff was the family’s jokester, the kind who would dump a bucket of cold water on his brother or sisters while they were taking a shower or playfully wrestle his mother to the ground. From an early age, he showed an interest in sports. He was on an elite lacrosse traveling team, which took him to several cities throughout the United States. The summer before Lucero’s killing he had made a name for himself as a “faceoff” specialist, which requires both physical strength and psychological skill. (The player has to guess how the opponent will move by the way his hands and wrists are positioned around the lacrosse stick.)
If Jeff’s typical week was a blur of school assignments and sports, the weekends were dedicated to helping his father on the fields where he coached neighborhood kids in football, baseball, and lacrosse. About a decade before, Conroy had founded the Pat-Med Booster Club, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to enable sports to continue to thrive in the community at a time when voters had failed to pass the school budget and the district was under “austerity” rules, meaning no new sports equipment could be purchased. With the initial funds raised by the club, about $372,000, Conroy also founded the Patchogue-Medford Youth Football and Cheerleading Club to establish Pee Wee football and cheerleading for children aged five to thirteen. Its mission: to “promote, foster and increase camaraderie and socializing among youth.”11
The athletic fields, two miles from his house, became Conroy’s “church”—he shuns organized religion—and Jeff’s second home. Jeff helped load the snack stand in the evenings before games and helped maintain the fields in top form. Too old for the Pee Wee leagues, he became a mentor to many children. At sixteen, Jeff helped coach eleven-year-old football players, and he spent one summer improving a boy’s lacrosse skills because the boy’s mother had asked him for help.
At home, Jeff mowed the lawn, did the laundry, and babysat his siblings when needed. Although sports and school kept him busy, he held some occasional jobs. Once, Pamela recalled, he worked for Wendy’s, but he was fired after two or three weeks when he was found eating chicken nuggets in the back.
“He was my back,” Conroy said. “The one who literally split the wood.”
Conroy, who dropped out of college after just one year, had once wanted to be a cop, but that dream died when he sliced the tip of his right index finger in a deli machine and realized he would never be able to pull a trigger. Later he became a manager at Kmart, but in 1997 he injured his back taking down a heavy box from a store shelf. He has not been able to return to work since, even after six back surgeries, supporting his family with his social security and disability checks. Still, he managed to take the children camping several times a year, and once a year they would splurge with a trip to Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.
For much of Jeff’s childhood the Conroys lived across the street from a house shared by at least six Latino men, though Conroy believes there were as many as two dozen people living in the house at one time. One of them catcalled one of his daughters, who was then thirteen or fourteen; Conroy spoke to the neighbors and the whistling stopped. The episode is etched in his memory as one of the few times—perhaps the only time—he interacted with a Latino immigrant in Medford. Those who knew him then recall that Conroy was obsessed with the house and its residents and feared that his daughters would one day be raped by the men who lived there.14 He was upset by their loud music and their backyard fires. What they were burning, he doesn’t know. Still, he said, if they didn’t bother him or his family, he “didn’t care” who his neighbors were.
Conroy’s focus was his family and coaching. Because he was surrounded by youngsters, he said, he would have heard if packs of teenagers, including his son, were roaming the streets looking for Latinos to attack. He never did. If Jeff had been carrying a knife, he would have known, he said. If his son harbored any ill feelings toward Latinos, he wasn’t aware, and he finds it impossible to believe it given that he used to think of Pamela as his future daughter-in-law and of kids named José and Juan as Jeff’s good friends.
The day before November 8, Jeff had been involved in a fight with a friend who had supposedly spread rumors that Jeff had herpes. It wasn’t his first serious fight. Three or four months before that, Jeff had been involved in another fight, at a party, but his father had not learned about it until a few days later. After that incident, Conroy had sat with his son and told him, If anything like that happens again, I’m your first call.
