by Mirta Ojito
The evidence was all around them. Their neighbors, the parents of his friends, were building houses two and three stories high. Young men in the United States were sending torn pages from magazines to their parents and pointing to the features they wanted to see in their new houses. An entertainment room, a formal dining room, a rooftop terrace, multiple bathrooms, marble counters, light-colored tiles on the floors, large television screens. The men sending their dreams home, one paycheck at a time, often slept in stables in eastern Long Island, next to the horses they tended, or crammed into basement apartments in Queens and elsewhere. They lived for the future, and the future began with a safe, elegant, and clean house that would bring all family members together.
Before the massive exodus of Gualaceños, few homes in that town had more than one bathroom, more than one floor, or a bedroom for each child. But once the town’s youth started to go north, Gualaceo changed its character. It doubled in size, and the stark differences between the haves and have-nots became even more pronounced.
Lucero’s family belonged to the have-nots. Sometimes there was not enough food in the house to eat. A paternal uncle would often come to the rescue, and the family would rally until they ran out of money again. Instead of helping his mother by getting a job, Lucero became depressed, getting out of bed at 11:00 a.m. or later and moaning all day about how he was wasting his life and not fulfilling his role as the oldest son.
One day, he got his siblings together for a meeting. “We have to have a better future. Mom, she’s not going to work forever,” he told them. “We have to sacrifice; we have to go over there to reach for the American dream.”5
His opinion was important to his siblings, who looked up to him and had considered him the man of the family since he had been nine. All of them, including Doña Rosario, hung on his every word. What would Marcelo say? What would he do? How he felt tended to change the atmosphere of their household and to color their moods.
A sister, Catalina, knowing well how desperate her brother was and how afraid her mother remained, counseled their mother to let him go. This time, Doña Rosario listened. A woman in town loaned the family $5,500, a little boy offered $20, and others pitched in as well.6 With the money in hand, the family set out to find a coyote, someone who would accompany Lucero on his journey through South and Central America and deliver him in one piece on the other side of the US-Mexico border. For fifteen days they planned his departure. Finally they found a coyote, gave him the money, and set a date.
Lucero left home on November 2, 1993, around 8:00 a.m., with $1,000 in his back pocket and two sets of clothing in a small backpack. His sisters and brothers lined up to hug him good-bye. He bent slightly and lowered his head in front of his mother, asking her for a blessing. Everyone, including Lucero, was weeping.
He took a bus to Cuenca and another from there to Guayaquil, where he boarded a flight to Tecumán, Guatemala. But as soon as he arrived at the Tecumán airport, the authorities there detained him: there was a problem with his travel visa, and he would have to be deported. On the way back to the plane that would take him home, Lucero asked for permission to use the bathroom. Permission granted, Lucero took off running for the door, and kept running through the streets of Tecumán until he realized no one was following him. Having lost contact with the coyote, he set out to make his way alone through Guatemala and Mexico. It took him almost two months, but eventually he made it to Texas and managed to call his family. I’m alive, he told them. And I’m on my way to New York.
“I don’t know how, but he did [make it],” his brother Joselo once told a documentary filmmaker. “He would say, I’m going to make it there no matter what. I’m not returning home alive.”7
Lucero arrived in New York on December 28, 1993. Somewhere along the way, the $1,000 in his pocket had been stolen. He was twenty-two years old.
When Doña Rosario found out her son had made it, her first thought was to wonder who would launder his shirts. He was so particular, she thought. Who is going to help him?
For a while, no one did.
After a short stint in New York City, Lucero moved in with six other young men he knew from Gualaceo, living in a big green house with five bedrooms and two bathrooms in Patchogue, near city hall and Main Street. He started working at a dry cleaner’s. While the other men played basketball in the park and cracked jokes in their living room after work, Lucero kept his distance. He was fastidious about his things and his space. He kept his bed made and his night table in order, and he demanded respect from the others, who thought he was a little stuck-up. After about three years, Lucero moved on.8 He rented a room on his own and began writing letters to his family that spoke of his loneliness, his hard life, and his yearning to see them soon. He complained that everyone in America was “addicted” to work.
“Everything here is always the same,” he wrote in Spanish on December 28, 1996. “I’m tired of being in my apartment, and tired of the same thing every day, every month, every year. All I do is work and work, and I look at myself in the mirror and I see that I look tired, and that I’m growing old.”9
On August 17, 1995, he sent what may have been his saddest letter. He had just had hernia repair surgery, and he found himself so alone that he despaired.
“This was so hard for me,” he wrote.
I was alone in the clinic. I went to sleep, and when I woke up I was in such pain that I felt the doctors had taken away half my life. All I could do was howl in pain. The worst part was that no one came to pick me up when it was time to go home the next day. To go up to my room, I had to drag myself up the stairs on my knees. Then I went to bed and I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t move. I was alone, locked in four walls, half moribund. I got very melancholic and I realized that in my journey in this life, I was alone. It was the most difficult experience in my life. I’m a little better now, taking small steps, but pale because I’ve lost a lot of blood.
He stopped writing four years later, after he bought a cell phone. In the last letter he sent to his family, in 1999, he wrote, “I’m a bird with broken wings,” and he drew the picture of a wingless dove. When Doña Rosario received her son’s letter a week after he wrote it, she wept at the sight of the drawing. Because she is illiterate, her daughter Isabel always read the letters to her. But she didn’t need anyone to explain the message her son had sent this time. She immediately understood that helping him leave had been a mistake.
One day, when he was driving down Main Street, Lucero thought he spotted a familiar face and stopped the car at the curve. He lowered his car window and shouted, Angel! What are you doing here?
Though the two had known each other for a long time, they hadn’t been close friends. In the land of soccer and volleyball—the sports Lucero and most Ecuadorian boys played—Loja was an anomaly. When he was thirteen, a man named Serafín Orellana had returned to Gualaceo after a few years in New York, where he had become a fan of NBA basketball. The man gathered a few boys, created a team, and taught them the intricate rules of the NBA. Loja was hooked. From 1988 to 1993 he played basketball every day with the team Orellana built, winning game after game in all local scrimmages. But before the team could move on to regional competitions, most of the boys and young men left Gualaceo and moved to Patchogue.
Lucero remembered Loja’s performance on the basketball court. Though not nearly tall enough to dunk the ball effortlessly, as those in the NBA seem to do, Loja managed to do it by jumping very high. That was his signature, his specialty: jump more than a meter off the ground, surprise the opponent, and dunk the ball. That jump, he was often told, had saved the team on many occasions, and it kept Loja off the streets and focused. He was an athlete, and he carried himself with the grace and assurance of the best of them.
Lucero admired Loja’s tenacity and game, and he remembered that as Loja approached his car on Main Street with a tentative smile. Loja felt a warm feeling overcome him, as he realized that, in the absence of family, an old acquaintance might just do. F
rom that day on, the two often spent time together, shopping, and eating at the home of a woman who cooked and sold the dishes they missed from home. They also became gym buddies, sometimes spending three or even five hours a day in the gym. However, Lucero would never play basketball with Loja for he knew that some of the boys who years ago had made fun of his raggedy clothes and naked feet in Gualaceo were now Loja’s basketball-playing friends in Patchogue.
The park outing and the sober talk about life and character and responsibility ended when Lucero suggested they go shopping at a mall in Smithtown, about ten miles away. They stopped at Express, one of Lucero’s favorite stores, where he bought a pair of pants for $90 and a few T-shirts, including one for which he paid $60 and which made him look as if he fit in. Maybe that was the point of all this shopping, Loja thought. Lucero wanted to blend in. If people were going to look at him because he spoke broken English and had a brown face, they might as well look at an elegantly dressed man. Loja bought some items too. Lucero seemed happy, more relaxed than when he had picked up Loja earlier in the day.
Let’s go home and eat, I’m hungry, he said, and Loja followed.
After stopping at Loja’s to drop off his purchase, they went to Lucero’s place, a second-floor studio with a small kitchen and a bathroom. His bed, as always, was made, and his Bible rested on the night table. A US flag dominated the wall behind the bed.
Come here, he said to Loja. I want to read you something I just found.
He picked up the Bible and tried to read Psalm 31, but inexplicably he stumbled over his words and handed it to Loja, who read out loud: “I’m scorned by all my enemies and despised by my neighbors—even my friends are afraid to come near me. When they see me on the street, they run the other way. I am ignored as if I were dead, as if I were a broken pot. I have heard the many rumors about me, and I am surrounded by terror. My enemies conspire against me, plotting to take my life.”10
Loja was not surprised by his friend’s chosen passage. Where they came from, death—even untimely death—was as common as life. It was another stage, a final one but one that everyone they knew was intimately familiar with. Lucero’s father had died young. Loja had lost an older brother, a twenty-four-year-old medical student, to a mysterious ailment of the throat that no one ever fully explained. As far as enemies, the men knew they had many.
To lighten their mood, Loja turned on the TV and the two started watching a National Geographic documentary about African mammals. Lucero opened two beers and Loja went to the corner deli and bought fried shrimp, for about $9, and more beer. Later he went back to get more shrimp and more beer before the deli closed. The owner, who was almost done for the day, didn’t charge him the second time. If Loja didn’t take the shrimp, he would have had to toss them anyway, but Loja took the gesture as he always did: proof that good things happened to him, another sign that God was looking out for him.
After dinner, the two friends smoked marijuana. It had been a good day, a relaxing day, and now Loja thought it was time to leave. Lucero offered to drive him home. Loja declined. The two had been drinking and all they needed was a police officer stopping them and smelling their breath. He decided to walk home alone. After all, it was only seven blocks.
Two blocks from Lucero’s home, Loja stopped to get a light for his cigarette from a passerby. Suddenly he felt a hand on his right shoulder and he jumped back, startled. It was Lucero, who had followed him.
What are you doing here? I already left you home, Loja said.
But Lucero wasn’t done for the night. He wanted to go to the train station where he had met a pretty girl a few nights before, he told Loja.
Let’s go, man, he pleaded. It’s still early.
Loja knew it was past 11:00 p.m., not a good time for two Latino men to be walking in the streets of Patchogue, but he reluctantly agreed to accompany Lucero because, once again, he felt his friend was anxious and needed some company. There was no one at the train station. The parking lot was empty and eerily quiet. A fog had descended on the balmy night. Lucero suggested they go to a nearby bar. Loja didn’t like the idea because he knew the bar was a hangout for the kind of white men who could spell trouble for brown men like them.
Not daring to leave his friend alone, Loja remembered that another friend, Elder Fernández, lived in a house behind the train station. Fernández was home watching TV and invited them over when Loja called.
As they made their way to Fernández’s house, Loja spotted a handful of young men approaching them from a side street. He counted them. Seven. They looked young. All but one were white. At least one wore a hoodie. When they were close enough to look them in the eye, Loja didn’t like what he saw. These boys are angry, he thought to himself, and he whispered to Lucero, Be careful.
Loja took two steps back to assess the situation. They were standing essentially in a cul-de-sac. To their left there were houses and a street blocked by the attackers. To their right, the train station. They could run back, but they would have to run very fast to find a way out for their exit was blocked on either side by either houses or the station. If they ran ahead, they might get to the alley where Loja’s friend lived, but they would have to be faster than the teenagers who were closing in like hunters on prey.
The group of young men was now upon them, breathing hard and bouncing on the balls of their feet, pumping their arms, laughing, and bumping into each other unself-consciously, the way teenagers do. Were they joking? Were they high? Drunk? Loja could practically smell their breath.
There was nothing to do but to stand their ground and fight. Loja turned to Lucero and yelled, Watch out!
CHAPTER 7
A MURDER IN THE SUBURBS
When they spotted the men, Kevin “Kuvan” Shea was almost joyful, like a father finding his child’s favorite toys under the bed. “There you go. They are right there,” he said. Taking large steps, he approached Lucero and Loja, with Anthony and José at his heels.1
Loja noticed that the teenagers had separated into two groups, as if to block any possible escape. The attack didn’t seem random but coordinated. They’ve done this before, he intuited, and started looking for a way out. This was not a fight they could win.
Then Loja thought he heard one of the attackers calling them “niggers.”
“I said something like, ‘Come through, nigga,’ which is a term we use to call someone out to fight,” Kevin told detectives later, in the early hours of November 9. “All of us were talking shit.”
Loja, who had already noticed that one of them was black, shouted back, “Who are you calling a nigger? You are the ugly nigger!”
Anthony, José, and Kuvan began to taunt the men to get a fight going. Yelling insults had worked in the past: get a lonely, drunken man angry and who knows what could happen? Get two powerless and possibly drunk men angry and the fun surely could be doubled. Nick asked, “What’s good, Beaners?” “Beaners” was one of their favorite insults. “Fucking Mexicans” was another. Except for Jeff and Chris and possibly Jordan, the rest began to hurl insults: “Fucking illegals! You come to this country to take our money! You get out of this country!”
Loja and Lucero replied with the only insults they could think of. They called their attackers “faggots.”
Anthony asked them if they had any money.
“No!” Lucero yelled back. “Why don’t you guys go to work like I go to work, so you can have your own money?”
Lucero took his denim jacket off, ready for a fight. Kuvan put his right hand into the waistband of his pants, as if he were going to pull out a gun, and said, “Cut the shit, motherfucker.” Lucero didn’t move. Kuvan got even closer and punched Lucero hard on the face, at the upper edge of his mouth, cutting his lip open. Lucero started bleeding, from his mouth or his nose or both, and Kuvan mocked him, “You’re already bleeding, that’s all I had to do.” Anthony threw a punch at Loja but missed.
On instinct, honed through years of jumping to dunk a basketball, Loja jumped so high h
e managed to get out of their reach and run toward the alley, where his friend Elder Fernández lived. Lucero ran in the opposite direction, with four of the teenagers closely behind.
Despite all the yelling and commotion, the streets were quiet. No one was at the train station. A train had left about an hour earlier, at 10:42 p.m.; the next one—the last train of the day—was not scheduled to come by until 11:59 p.m.2 They were alone and there seemed to be no time to pull out a cell phone and call the police. Everything was moving too fast and too slow at the same time. Loja could see movements as if in slow motion, and he could hear the insults and the blows as if he were under water. His head felt stuffed with cotton, but his senses were alert and his skin felt prickly and sweaty. The only thought in his brain was to escape—if possible, unhurt and with his friend.
Out of the corner of his eye, Loja could see that Lucero had fallen. Four young men were yelling and kicking him as if he were a football. For a moment Loja remembered the documentary of the African mammals he had watched earlier that evening with Lucero. This is what they are doing to my friend, he thought. Tearing him apart like hyenas.
At the sight of the blood, the rest of the attackers who had at one point encircled Loja felt emboldened and ran to aid the others with Lucero, who had already managed to get up and was swinging his belt over his head, forcing the gang to move toward the parking lot. At first, Kuvan thought Lucero had a nunchaku; Anthony thought it was a chain with a lock on the end, but Jeff realized it was a belt. A belt seemed less dangerous than a martial arts weapon, and they must have thought that seven young, agile men could easily handle two dazed men, especially with one hurt and bleeding, even if he was swinging a belt. Kuvan gave an order: “Surround them!”
The tone of the fight had changed. This was no longer a one-sided fight, like the one the teenagers had just had, kicking the back and legs of Héctor Sierra while he folded his body, covered his head, and took the blows while screaming for help. In Lucero, they had found the angry man they had been looking for—an opponent who was as fearless as they were reckless. Except for Jordan, who was afraid to hurt his back, the others obeyed Kuvan’s command and crowded around Lucero in a half circle. But Jeff got too close and the buckle of the swinging belt hit him on the head. He quickly touched his forehead, enraged, then took out his pocketknife and approached.
