Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  “This is how you run across the border,” one of the skinheads shouted as he chased the Latinos around with the running chainsaw. The attacker, fifteen, was later charged as a juvenile with reckless endangerment.50

  On September 10, 2006, in Hampton Bays, New York, Carlos Rivera, a construction worker from Honduras, was stabbed multiple times outside a bar by Thomas Nicotra and Kenneth Porter, who yelled racial epithets during the attack. Nicotra and Porter, who were known to have insulted bar patrons before, were charged with felony robbery and assault as hate crimes. Porter was sentenced to one year in Suffolk County Jail for first-degree assault after testifying against Nicotra, who was sentenced to nine years in state prison.51

  Almost two years later, on the night of July 12, 2008, in the coal town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, several high school football players were coming home from a party when they came across Luis Ramírez, twenty-five, an undocumented Mexican immigrant. An argument broke out, with some of the football players yelling ethnic slurs at Ramírez. Two of them—Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak—began fighting with Ramírez, who was knocked out after a punch in the face. When he was down, prosecutors later charged, Piekarsky gave him a kick to the head. Ramírez died two days later from head injuries. The following year Piekarsky and Donchak were both acquitted of all serious charges against them, but later, indicted on federal charges, they were found guilty of a hate crime and each sentenced to nine years in prison.52

  Ramírez was the first Latino victim of a hate crime to become a national story in 2008. The second was Marcelo Lucero, in Patchogue.

  By the time Jordan Dasch drove his 1996 red SUV into Patchogue, the village was quiet and few were walking the streets. The library, the hub of activity in the evenings, had long closed. The lights of the theater were off and only the cleaning crews remained in the restaurants on Main Street.

  Suddenly the group spotted a man walking down the street. Kuvan thought he was Hispanic and yelled, “Stop the car! Stop the car! Let’s get this guy.” Jordan stopped the car fifty to seventy yards in front of the man. Kuvan, Anthony, Nick, and José jumped out of the car and ran toward the man. Jeff, Jordan, and Chris also got out of the car but stayed near it.

  The man the group had spotted was Héctor Sierra, a fifty-seven-year-old waiter at Gallo Tropical, a popular Latin restaurant on Main Street owned by a Colombian family. He had come to the United States legally in 1973 and had lived in New Jersey, Queens, and Manhattan before settling in Patchogue, a place he thought was safe and quiet.53 A naturalized US citizen, he had lived back and forth between Patchogue and his native Colombia for years. At the time, he had been working at Gallo Tropical for seven years and had risen to the position of headwaiter.54

  That day, he had started his shift at 10:00 a.m. and had worked until 11:30 p.m. to accumulate a little overtime. He was tired and decided to leave the restaurant through the back door to shave off a block from his seven-block walk home. It was foggy and dark in the streets, almost midnight, and Sierra walked fast. He had little on him: a watch, a cell phone, and a wallet with a few dollars in it, but he had heard about groups attacking Hispanic men in the streets, so he was cautious. He wore a baseball cap, put his hands in the pockets of his coat, and walked with his head down.

  Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a reddish, perhaps brown, SUV making a left turn and passing him slowly, as if whoever was in the car was watching him or knew him and wanted to stop and say hello. Sierra didn’t know anybody who owned an SUV. He walked faster. He couldn’t tell how many people were in the car but heard voices and knew immediately that, were anything to happen, he would be outnumbered.

  The car stopped in front of a building. It was the only car around, and the streets were deserted. Sierra heard a noise from inside the car, three or four popping sounds, one after the other. To him, it sounded like a small-caliber gun. Then he saw four young men get out of the car—two from the right side and two from the left. They are young, he thought. Very young. Still, there were four of them and he was alone. Whoever was still inside the car kept the motor running. Not a good sign.

  Then the four young men started running toward him. They were fast. Sierra recalled that a couple of his coworkers had been beaten up recently by youngsters. He was afraid the same was about to happen to him. He couldn’t run forward. He couldn’t stay in place. So he turned around and started running away, as he would later testify, “like hell.”

  “It’s weird,” he would later recall, “because as I was running away from them, you know my mother passed away like a couple of months before that ordeal and, as I was running from them, I was praying to my mother’s soul. I don’t know, it was like a short movie. It runs through your mind so fast and I was praying to my mother and to take me away from these wolves because I didn’t know them, I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know what their purpose was, so it was very scary.”55

  The young men caught up with Sierra from behind. They punched him on the ears and kicked him. Afraid to get his face hurt, Sierra tried to keep his head down and didn’t turn around to face them. He kept running, despite the blows, but eventually tripped and fell. He ripped his pants and cut his knee. Eerily, the young men were quiet as they attacked him, never yelling or insulting or even asking for money, as he had feared.

  Sierra stood up, afraid that if he stayed down they would hurt him even more. He started moving in a zigzag way to avoid and confuse them. He got to a house where he thought Hispanic residents lived, but he tripped again and the young men chasing him began to kick him from behind. Sierra dragged himself on the lawn, trying to reach the porch of the house. He was now yelling for help.

  He managed to reach the porch but no one was coming to his aid. “There were people up there and they never came out there. They were afraid to open the doors or something. I felt so defenseless, so lonely.”56 Desperate and trying to get away from the hard blows and relentless kicks, he started pounding on the windows. One cracked but didn’t break. He kicked the front door. Hard. He was somewhat embarrassed that he too had become an aggressor, but he felt he had no choice.

  The light of the porch went on but the door remained closed.

  The light may have scared the attackers who backed up a few steps, enough time for Sierra to turn around and take a look at them. To him, they were simply “white kids.” Two were right behind him; two others were farther away, staring. The teenagers ran away toward the SUV, and Sierra walked to the street to see where they were going. They got in the car quickly and made a left on Thorne Street.

  Sierra realized that, although the attackers were gone, he was still screaming. His throat felt parched and raw, his mouth dry. A man in a car waiting for the light to change saw him and asked why he was screaming. Sierra finally realized the ordeal was over and he was no longer alone. He told the man what had happened and the man urged him to call 911. Sierra tried, but his phone wasn’t working; it had been damaged in the attack. The man drove him to a nearby 7-Eleven, hoping to find a police car along the way or maybe even parked there. But the 7-Eleven was deserted. It was close to midnight. Exhausted, in pain, and afraid, Sierra gave up trying to find a phone or a cop, and he walked home without telling anyone what had happened to him that night.

  If he had, if his phone had been working, if someone had called the police, if the Hispanics in the house with the porch and the light had offered help, perhaps the young men in the car would have given up on their evening entertainment and driven home. But no one stopped them.

  The SUV took off fast. A few blocks away, Jordan parked in a parking lot near the library, and the seven young men inside the car tumbled out. They were pumped with adrenaline and started walking down Railroad Avenue, toward the train station. They were going to end the night as they had started it—by the train tracks.

  Suddenly they saw two men walking out of a parking lot and down Railroad Avenue. The men, brown-skinned and with short black hair, appeared to be Hispanic. The teenagers couldn’t
have known their names then, but they were about to confront Angel Loja and Marcelo Lucero, best friends who had known hardships and poverty but never violence.

  As Jeff would later tell police, “Everyone was pretty amped up and it was clear what we were going to do.”57

  CHAPTER 6

  UNWANTED

  On the early afternoon of November 8, 2008, Angel Loja was lounging on his couch, mindlessly watching television, feeling the tension of the week ebb away. The windows of his tiny second-floor apartment were open and a balmy breeze wafted in from the bay. Loja was feeling lazy and unencumbered.1

  It was a Saturday, the first day of a nonworking weekend, and Loja had every intention of savoring his time off. No one was waiting for him. His last girlfriend had left him so depleted and heartbroken that he hadn’t dared to even look at a woman in a long time. He felt as if this was the state that God intended for him: alone but at peace. He was free of the drugs he had dabbled in years earlier. He no longer woke up in the harsh light of the morning wondering where he was, startled that once again he had slept on a park bench. For eight years now, he had been living in Patchogue, and he had a stable job where on a good week he could make as much as $520.

  Every weekday and some Saturdays, from 7:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., he sawed and hammered and nailed pieces of wood together, building house frames for a construction company. On his days off, like today, he could afford to do nothing, letting his shoulder muscles relax, his callous hands rest, and his thoughts wander aimlessly, muffled by the sound of the television.

  The phone rang and Loja considered not picking it up, but the screen showed the name of his old friend, Marcelo Lucero.

  Lucero sounded anxious and a little rushed when Loja answered the phone with a tired hello.

  ¿Qué más? What are you doing? Lucero asked.

  The call startled Loja but did not really surprise him. For several years now, ever since they had found each other on the streets of Patchogue, Lucero often called on Loja to accompany him on shopping errands, to work out in the gym, or to dine together. Both single and unattached, they had an easy camaraderie born out of their similar circumstances: friends in a foreign land, pining for home while hungry for the promise of a better life.

  Both had found their way to the United States after separate but equally harrowing journeys. They knew what it was like to search for jobs while trying to communicate in broken English. They were baffled by the intricacies of the rules in their new country, afraid of the police, and even more afraid of those who seemed to fear them: Long Island nativists who saw in the newcomers from Latin America a threat to their way of life.

  Dark and athletic, Lucero and Loja were both highly spiritual, seeking otherworldly reasons for events or circumstances that others would see as coincidental. Once, when Lucero took a picture in the dark, the photo revealed an unexpected streak of light. Lucero thought he saw an arm, bent at the elbow. Loja did too. A spirit, they decided.

  The unexplained world of spirits and saintly visions was not an abstract thought for them. In their world—an experience common to most Latin Americans of humble means and little formal education—nothing was more important than the word and the will of God. If things went well, it was God’s will. If they didn’t, that too was God’s will. Whatever happened, the answer was unquestionable acceptance.

  I’m here, just hanging out, Loja said, reaching over to lower the television volume so he could hear his friend over the phone.

  Let’s go out—I’m bored, said Lucero, who had just left his midday shift at a dry cleaner’s in Riverhead, where he worked ironing other people’s fine clothing. In a previous job, also in a dry cleaner’s, he had lost all his fingernails to a fungus that thrived on humidity. Ironing was a more tiresome but less painful job than exposing his hands to the soap, water, and brush used to attack the ring around the collar of the hundreds of shirts Lucero handled every week.

  Aren’t you going to take a shower first? Loja inquired, trying to buy some time because he really didn’t feel like getting up from the couch just yet.

  No, no, I don’t even want a shower. I just want to go somewhere, Lucero answered.

  Resigned, Loja grabbed a sweater and walked out the door, not even bothering to turn off the TV. To get his blood flowing and sound more alert, he skipped steps as he went downstairs to meet Lucero, who was at the wheel of his green Nissan Sentra, a fourteen-year-old car that he drove every day to work, about twenty-five miles each way. As always, he was dressed impeccably, even though he had just come from work: nicely creased khaki pants, a light-colored T-shirt, new Skechers shoes, and a Levi’s jean jacket.

  They drove to a nearby park in Holbrook, a town about six miles away, and decided to take a walk. Though it was fall, the temperature hovered in the upper fifties, and the trees that had yet to cede their leaves to the onslaught of winter were bursting with life. Lucero noticed some worms inching along the trunk of an old tree. This is life, he said joyously. So much life.

  Loja chuckled, thinking Lucero was acting a little strange, but before he could ask him about his mood, Lucero launched into one of his usual monologues. He counseled Loja on how to be a good man, a man who fought for his rights, who worked and saved, who knew how to eat and how to behave on all occasions. Lucero, who could easily spend $1,000 in a shopping spree at the local mall, drilled Loja on the need to have the right outfit for each occasion. If it’s raining, don’t wear sneakers, wear rain boots, he would tell Loja.

  Lucero liked to cast himself as Loja’s older, wiser brother, though the two were practically the same age. Lucero was thirty-seven, and Loja was thirty-six, but Lucero recognized that Loja had felt lost in America. He knew about the drugs and about the two relationships that had left him broken and despondent. He also knew that Loja was an angry man, who had walked away from jobs out of pride.

  When he had been mistreated at his first job when he arrived in New York, the exchange had left Loja weary and a little scared. If this was his welcoming, what else could go wrong? What else should he be prepared for? For a young man who believed in premonitions and signs, Loja’s first experience in New York had not been a good omen.

  In time, his feelings hardened. No one seemed to have a soul here, he thought. There is no time for spirituality or even for kindness. Money, money, money, was all everyone thought about. The one thing he didn’t lose, the dream that he kept tucked away in his heart, was his desire to go home. But for that too he needed money.

  Often, as he did that day in the park, Lucero would remind Loja of an aspect of his own childhood. Your mother knew how to dress you; you always had the best clothes, Lucero would tell Loja. Lucero said it as a fact, a statement without bitterness or pain, but Loja knew why Lucero always mentioned that particular detail of his childhood, and why he was so exacting about clothing. As a child, Lucero had seldom worn new outfits. Other boys, cruelly, would make fun of him. Because he was the older boy, he always wore new pants but had to take good care of them. His younger brother, Joselo, was waiting to inherit them.2 Sometimes, Loja knew, Lucero hadn’t even had shoes to wear, which was ironic because the town of Gualaceo had once built its fleeting wealth on its reputation as the shoemaking capital of Ecuador. Everyone in Gualaceo, it seemed, could stretch a piece of leather over a wooden last and make a beautiful shoe.

  Lucero had grown up poor, the oldest child of four—two boys, two girls—in a home ruled by a mostly absent shoemaker-father and supported by a short, stout woman who cooked for a living and kept her children under close supervision. Despite their poverty, or perhaps because of it, the boys had a carefree childhood, picking peaches and pears from the trees, and racing homemade wooden cars down the narrow streets that surround Gualaceo’s main square.3

  When Lucero was eight, in 1979, his father doubled over his worktable and died suddenly of a heart attack. His twenty-nine-year-old widow, Rosario, had to work nonstop to support the family, while keeping a vigilant eye on her children, particularly Lucero,
who was overly attached to her. When she cleaned the house, he walked with her, holding on to the hem of her skirt. When she stayed up late at night sewing their torn clothing, he went to sleep at her feet. Doña Rosario, as everyone called her in a customary sign of respect for married or widowed women, was a stern disciplinarian. If the children misbehaved, she hit them. Lucero hated it when his mother turned her ire on him. He would run away, but his mother would run after him and bring him home.4

  At the end of sixth grade, Lucero, who had never liked school, refused to continue his education. As the oldest son, he felt it was his duty to take care of the family, but in Gualaceo the options were limited. At first, he started helping in the kitchen, pounding on the corn mixture his mother prepared to make the pastries the family sold in the open market next to the church. Later, as a teenager, his mother found him a job selling locally made silver jewelry—much admired all over the country—in Quito, the capital, and other towns and cities, but his heart wasn’t in it. What he wanted was to follow his friends to the United States.

  At sixteen he tried to leave for the first time. As always, he turned to his mother for help and he asked her to borrow money from her acquaintances to fund his trip, but Doña Rosario, fearing the journey and the separation from her firstborn, didn’t ask anyone for help. She lied and told him no one had wanted to lend money to such a young man supported by a single mother. What were the chances that they would ever get their money back?

  At the time, the family lived in a small apartment. The girls slept with their mother in one bed, the boys bedded together in another. They shared a bathroom with three other families. A lightbulb in the courtyard was always on, which bothered Lucero and didn’t let him sleep through the night.

  I have to leave this house, Mama, he announced one day, and she understood that she couldn’t hold him back much longer. What am I doing here? he would ask and look around with mournful eyes, as if searching for the friends he knew were already living in the United States and doing well.