Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  Loja had enough time to pull his belt from his pants to try to help Lucero, but he realized the situation was too dangerous. Too many of them moving around, trying to squeeze in between the swinging belts. If the attackers managed to grab the belts, their one chance was over. Loja headed back toward the driveway where he had been standing seconds before. He fell to the ground and looked back, searching for Lucero, who this time was trying to follow him, swinging the belt as he walked backward, while keeping an eye on his attackers. Loja got up and ran toward the alley, momentarily losing sight of his friend.

  Lucero swung at whoever was closest to him. It happened to be Nick. Jeff noticed and lunged toward Lucero with the open knife in his right hand. Lucero’s back was toward Jeff, but he turned around suddenly, as if he could sense the danger. Jeff, who was about four or five feet from Lucero, continued to run toward him with his arm outstretched—the hand with the knife leading the way. It’s impossible to know if Lucero saw the weapon, if it glinted in the light from the lampposts. Loja knows he didn’t see it. Except for Lucero and Jeff, no one else seemed to have noticed the moment when Jeff plunged his knife beneath Lucero’s right collarbone, close to the shoulder.

  When Loja turned around toward the attackers, he saw that Lucero had fallen. He called out to him but Lucero didn’t get up.

  Suddenly the fight stopped. Jeff said to Nick, “We really gotta go.” The others were still near Lucero, and Jeff yelled to them, “Let’s go!” Kuvan must have detected a sense of urgency in Jeff’s voice because he too called out for everyone to leave, and they all began to walk away.

  Jeff, Chris, and Kuvan walked ahead of the others. When they turned a corner toward Main Street, Jeff said, “Oh, shit. I’m fucked. I stabbed him,” and he showed them the blood on the knife. Chris urged him to get rid of the knife, but instead Jeff cleaned it in a puddle, trying to wash the blood from it, folded the blade, and put it back in his pants pocket. Jeff also told Nick that he had stabbed the man who had been bleeding. That explains it, said Kuvan, noting that all the blood on the man’s shirt couldn’t have been caused by his solitary punch to the face. Anthony, who had heard Jeff’s hushed confession, told him he “had his back” and offered to take the knife and make it disappear, but Jeff refused and kept walking toward the car with the others.

  Some of them thought they might just be able to get away, but then they noticed a camera on a building and realized that was a dangerous sign. If the camera was on, sooner or later they would be found. But before they could even articulate their fears, they heard the siren from a police car.

  From his relatively safe spot, Loja called out again: Marcelo Lucero come, come this way. Loja kept calling out to him as the young men walked away. The fight was over. He thought that maybe someone had called the police, but no one was there. They were still alone. Only about five minutes had passed, but to Loja, shaking and pumped with adrenaline, it had seemed like hours. Still hovering over by the alley, Loja once again called out to Lucero, who had gotten up and was staggering like a drunk toward his jacket on the ground. He picked it up and went to join Loja. As Lucero approached, Loja heard the sound first, a hissing, like that of a half-opened garden hose: pshshsh. Then he noticed the blood, an ever-expanding stain on Lucero’s shirt. By the time Lucero reached him, the blood had drenched his shirt and pants, down to his mid-thighs. Loja had never seen so much blood before. Instinctively he reached for his friend and asked what even then sounded like a silly question to him.

  “Marcelo, are you all right?”

  “No. Call an ambulance,” Lucero managed to say before the gurgling sound of his own blood drowned his voice and he slumped over in his friend’s arms.

  Loja pulled out his phone and, with fingers sticky with blood, dialed 911.

  The operator answered on the first ring, but then Loja’s phone, which had been running out of charge, went dead. That first failed call, the police would later reveal, was made at 11:52 p.m. The operator called back, and the phone came alive momentarily, but again it died before Loja could utter a word. Desperate, he dragged Lucero’s limp body onto the driveway and placed it halfway under a parked car, hoping to afford his friend some protection in case the attackers came back. He left Lucero momentarily and ran to the small, white-painted house where Elder Fernández lived. He pounded on the door and Fernández, who had been waiting for them, came quickly to the door.

  “Elder, help me. They just stabbed my friend and he’s bleeding a lot. Please call 911.”

  He did. The call came in at 11:55 p.m. Within a minute, it seemed, two police cars arrived. Suffolk County police officer Frank Munsch was in one of the cars. When he got out, Loja told them what had happened and lifted up Lucero’s shirt so he could see the gushing wound.

  “There was significant blood loss,” Officer Munsch would later testify.3

  Lucero was breathing rapidly, lying faceup in a pool of blood. His hands and feet shook, but he was conscious and his eyes were open.4 At 11:59 p.m., the officer called for a “rush rescue.” Under oath in court more than a year later, Munsch said that he applied pressure on the wound while making the phone call.5 But Loja has maintained from the beginning that when he showed the officer Lucero’s wound, the officer went to his car, retrieved a rag, and threw it on Lucero but didn’t do anything else except question Loja for a description of the attackers. Short of breath and in broken English, Loja told him what had happened and described the young men as well as he could. Munsch had seen those teenagers walking in the area earlier, and he put out a description over his police radio.6 The other officers asked Loja to go with them. Another police crew had already stopped seven suspicious young men at the corner of Main Street and Ocean Avenue. Would he help identify them? Reluctantly, Loja got in one of the police cars and was driven away. As he looked back, he noticed the ambulance had not yet arrived.

  Christopher Schiera, a dispatcher for the Medford Fire Department and a volunteer with the Patchogue Ambulance Company, had just gotten home in Holtsville when he received the call: an adult male was bleeding by the train tracks in Patchogue, about five miles south. The call came in at 12:01 a.m. on November 9, exactly forty-six minutes after he had finished his six-hour shift.7

  The Patchogue Ambulance Company, founded in 1934 by a small group of volunteer firemen from the Patchogue Fire Department, answers approximately twenty-four hundred calls per year, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.8 At the time, Schiera was the company’s assistant chief, which meant that he was in charge of staffing the ambulance and overseeing personnel, who were, with one exception, volunteers.

  Schiera had been certified as an emergency medical technician of critical care, or EMTCC; he also had an advanced cardiac life support certification. As an EMTCC he had been qualified to attempt resuscitation, perform the Heimlich maneuver, and use an automated external defibrillator—commonly found in public buildings, police cars, and ambulances. In addition, he could have started an IV, administered drugs, performed an EKG, and intubated patients. At the time of the attack, though, Schiera’s EMTCC certification had lapsed. While he was enrolled in a refresher class to get back his license, he wasn’t supposed to perform any of the advanced life support techniques necessary when a patient has lost a lot of blood. He could drive, however, and when the call came over his portable radio for an ambulance driver, Schiera volunteered. Along with his girlfriend, who was also a volunteer, he drove toward the company headquarters to pick up the ambulance and crew that was already in-house. But halfway there, the dispatcher called again. The police department needed the ambulance immediately. The dispatcher said the man bleeding near the tracks had been the victim of a stabbing.

  Schiera knew who was on call at the Patchogue Ambulance Company that day: two people who were certified to administer basic help but not to drive an ambulance. Under certain circumstances—when a patient is in critical need, for example—the company allows drivers not officially qualified to drive the ambulance to do so. This was one of t
hose circumstances. Schiera asked the crew—Stephanie Mara and Gabriel Salerno—to drive the ambulance themselves and told them he would meet them at Funaro Court, where the man lay bleeding.

  The ambulance got to Lucero at 12:12 a.m., two minutes before Schiera did.

  There were several police cars near the entrance to Funaro Court, a street that to Schiera initially seemed like the driveway of the white, two-story house he saw there. The lights from the cars had attracted some people, who milled around competing for a chance to see the bleeding man on the ground.

  Mara and Salerno were already attending to Lucero, whose name they did not yet know. They took his vital signs: his respiratory rate was 28 and labored—a normal rate wouldn’t be above 16 or 20, at the most; his pulse rate was 46—a normal one is 60–100 beats a minute; and his level of consciousness was rated as reacting only to pain. EMTs rate four levels of consciousness: “alert,” which means that the patient is alert and talking; “voice” or “verbal,” which means that the patient is confused but talking; “pain,” which means that the patient does not respond except to some form of tactile stimulation, such as being moved, or to having a flashlight shone in his or her eyes; and “unresponsive,” which means just that. Lucero was one level away from being unresponsive.

  Mara and Salerno got a long backboard to stabilize Lucero, holding his head in such a way to keep it in line with his spine. But Schiera thought the board wasn’t necessary. The man lying on the ground before him had gone into shock. He was very pale, he was sweating profusely, and his breathing was short, rapid, and labored. He was not speaking and his eyes were closed. Shock is often described as the transition between life and death. He was bleeding from the wound in his chest, and half his body was still under the parked SUV where Loja had left him.

  Schiera noticed bloody gauze on the ground and took a closer look at Lucero’s chest. He asked one of the crew members to grab the oxygen tank and a mask and apply it to the victim. Vital signs were taken again, three minutes after the first check. Lucero’s respiratory rate was not recorded because at that point he had an oxygen mask on; his pulse had lowered even more, to 40 beats per minute; and now his level of consciousness had dropped to “unresponsive.”

  Lucero’s breathing was so labored that the oxygen mask didn’t help him. Schiera asked for a device known as an Asherman chest seal, a dressing used when a punctured lung is suspected. He had no idea how deep Lucero’s injury was or what had caused it but he assumed the worst and reasoned that the chest seal would help him by allowing air to escape from the chest while stopping the bleeding. But then, as they attempted to move Lucero, he began to bleed again, more profusely this time, and the seal washed right off his chest. They put Lucero back down and inserted a plastic device in his mouth to keep the airways clear. They also applied another oxygen mask and a bulky dressing to stanch the bleeding. At 12:25 a.m., thirteen minutes after the ambulance had arrived but twenty-nine minutes after Fernández had called 911, Lucero was finally placed in the ambulance and driven away from Funaro Court, leaving behind a trail of blood.

  Six or seven police cruisers convened at the area known as Four Corners in the Village of Patchogue, the intersection of Ocean Avenue and Main Street. Seven teenagers had their hands up, their hearts in their throats, and their bodies pressed against the glass windows of a real estate office.

  A cop named Richardsen began to frisk the teenagers for weapons. When he got to Jeff, he patted him once and didn’t feel anything, but then Jeff said, “Can I speak to you in private?”

  The officer pulled him aside. “I got the knife on me,” Jeff said.

  “Where?”

  “In the waistband.”

  Richardsen lifted up Jeff’s sweatshirt, found the knife, and opened the blade.

  “There’s blood on it,” he said.

  To which Jeff replied, “I stabbed the guy.”9

  Just then, Loja arrived on the scene in a police car. His attackers were lined up against the wall. Loja could see them all clearly, except for the one he knew to be black, José Pacheco, though he didn’t know his name. He told the police that one was missing, the dark-skinned one, and they brought him forth so Loja could take a good look. They shone a flashlight on José’s face. That’s him, Loja said, and stayed put, legs shaking, looking at the group for a few more minutes. He watched as the police took them away. Then he too was driven to the Fifth Police Precinct.

  The emergency crew wanted to take Lucero to a helicopter landing zone at Briarcliffe College, a few blocks away from Funaro Court. The crew thought that his condition was critical and that he needed to be airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital about fourteen miles to the north. As a level-one trauma center, the hospital has a trauma team that includes a surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologists, and aides on standby twenty-four hours a day, seven day a week. The team can perform surgery right in the emergency room, without losing precious moments moving a broken body to another area. Brookhaven Hospital, which is the closest hospital to Patchogue, not even five minutes away, has doctors on call who are trained to handle trauma, but they can’t perform surgery in the emergency room—it is not a level-one trauma center.10

  At 12:28 a.m., the ambulance arrived at the college, ready to transfer Lucero to the helicopter, which hadn’t yet arrived. At that very moment, the crew noticed that Lucero’s heart had stopped beating. An air ambulance is not supposed to transport patients who’ve gone into cardiac arrest. The crew decided to take him to Brookhaven Hospital after all. On the way there, they began administering CPR, compressing his chest and trying to help Lucero breathe with an oxygen mask. They also used an external defibrillator. Police cars blocked off intersections and stopped traffic for them, but they had to make one more stop to pick up a medic from the Holbrook Fire Department. The medic had been called because, unlike the others in the ambulance, he was trained and certified at a more advanced level.

  Brookhaven Hospital was so close that all the medic had time to do was to check the electrical output of Lucero’s heart with an EKG machine. The situation was dire. They arrived at the hospital at 12:34 a.m. As Schiera was pulling the patient from the back of the ambulance, he took a look at the EKG monitor. It showed a heart rhythm known as “pulseless electrical activity”—a medical term for a heart in its final stages of life, producing electricity that resembles a heartbeat but it is not.

  Medical personnel, who had already been alerted to the severity of Lucero’s condition, met them at the door. But it was too late. Lucero was pronounced dead at 1:09 a.m. on November 9, about an hour and a half after he was stabbed. The medical examiner would later confirm the obvious: the cause of death was a four-inch-deep stab wound to the chest.11

  “Is this going to be a problem for the wrestling season?” Jeffrey Conroy asked homicide detective John A. McLeer of the Suffolk County Police Department. It was about 3:30 a.m. Five minutes earlier, McLeer, accompanied by another detective, James Faughnan, had gone into the room where Jeff sat handcuffed. He was wearing blue jeans, a black, gray, and gold Patchogue-Medford Raiders basketball sweatshirt with white piping, and black sneakers. At some point, McLeer would have to ask Jeff to take off his clothes. They would become evidence.12

  McLeer introduced himself and took off Jeff’s handcuffs, which were connected to a chain that was attached to the desk. McLeer and Faughnan had the task of finding out what had transpired at Funaro Court. But first they needed to respond to Jeff’s question.

  “Jeff, we’re from the homicide squad. Forget about wrestling. It’s the least of your problems right now. That’s the least of your concerns,” McLeer said.

  And just like that, Jeff’s transformation from star athlete to murder suspect began.

  The interview room in the Fifth Precinct detective area was small and square, just over nine feet by nine feet. The concrete block walls were painted off-white. The floor was tiled and sparsely furnished—just a desk and chairs. From the one window in the room, blocked by bars, one could
see the outside. A solid wooden door separated interviewers and interviewees from the rest of the precinct. A desk, old and chipped, was against the wall with the window. Faughnan sat at one end, opposite Jeff. McLeer sat in the middle. They asked Jeff some basic information—name, date of birth, address, phone number—and then read him the Miranda rights.13

  After each sentence, Jeff wrote his initials, indicating he had understood his rights: “You have the right to remain silent.” (He didn’t remain silent.) “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” (Everything he said was used against him—immediately and also in court.) “You have the right to talk with a lawyer right now and have him present while you are being questioned.” (Jeff did not call a lawyer; he didn’t even ask to call his parents.) “If you cannot afford a lawyer and want one, a lawyer will be appointed for you by the court before any questioning. If you decide to answer questions now without a lawyer present, you will have the right to stop the questioning at any time until you talk to a lawyer.” (Jeff talked for hours, not stopping until his father—whom he eventually called—told him to.)14

  With the legal stuff out of the way, Detective McLeer asked him how he had ended up at the Fifth Precinct.

  “I already told the big cop what I did, and he’s got my knife,” Jeff said. The “big cop” was Michael Richardsen, who had already turned in the knife, now tucked away in McLeer’s gun locker.