by Mirta Ojito
One thing was clear, the detective told him: six of the seven alleged perpetrators were white, and the victim was a Latino man who lived in Patchogue, a few blocks from the house where Pontieri had grown up and where his mother still lived. Not one of the young men under investigation for the killing lived in the village, but they lived nearby, close enough so that Pontieri was sure that people he knew were bound to know who they were or at least know their parents. Close enough so that some kids in the village surely had played baseball or football with at least one of the attackers. Close enough, Pontieri thought, to create the perception that Patchogue was a dangerous place.
Pontieri went home and began calling the village trustees. There was nothing to do and seemingly nothing to prepare for, he told them. He was simply alerting them so that they wouldn’t be surprised when they watched the evening news or read the next morning’s paper.
At around 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. he finally got the call he was expecting from the county executive’s office, and that’s when he learned that detectives were treating the case as a hate crime. Pontieri was an educated man, an educator himself, and a baby boomer. He had been a young man during the civil rights movement, and he was familiar with the term “hate crimes.” But his idea of a hate crime was something that happened elsewhere, to other people. He couldn’t understand it, and then he remembered the call he had received just a few days before from Jean Kaleda, the librarian.
This, he realized, was what Kaleda had been talking about. This was the type of attack the immigrants in the library feared. The crime the night before had not been an aberration after all. A young man had killed Lucero, but he knew the entire village would soon be implicated in the crime. How could I not have known that this was going on? Pontieri berated himself. Something else was bothering him as well. It was inconceivable to him that when he had heard the name of the victim, Marcelo Lucero, he had not recognized it. He took pride in knowing virtually everyone in town—not because he was the mayor but because Patchogue was his home. It was clear to him then that he hadn’t been paying attention. He should have realized that the streets had not been safe for some residents, those more vulnerable to abuse and attacks precisely because they were newcomers, unknown to most, unknown even to him. He resolved to change that and to bridge the gap with people he previously hadn’t really noticed.
Days later, when a reporter from the New York Times called, Pontieri was already steeped in his new role as the conciliatory mayor, the mayor for all—especially those whose names he didn’t know. “It is imperative that we bridge the divide,” he told the reporter, “and realize that the things we have in common far outnumber those that divide us.”3
But his urging was premature, and his hope for unity was far too idealistic for a village that had suddenly become the new ground zero in the immigration debate.
On Sunday morning, Denise and Warren Overton were frantic with worry. They had driven around all night looking for their son. They kept calling his cell phone number and getting his voice mail. Their hope was that Chris had found a girl he liked and was with her, turning off his phone so his parents wouldn’t interrupt his romance. It was uncharacteristic but possible, they reasoned.4
Eventually the Overtons drove to Alyssa’s home and asked about their son. She didn’t know where Chris was and didn’t know where Jeff Conroy lived, but she had the phone number of a cousin of José Pacheco. That led to a conversation with José’s aunt, and an address for the Conroys. But when the Overtons got to the house where they thought Jeff lived and where they hoped they would find their son, no one answered the door. They walked around the house, kicked a basement window, banged on the door, and yelled out their son’s name. Nothing. They had the wrong house.
For some reason, it never occurred to them to call the police. Sometime around 3:00 p.m., as she was talking on her cell phone with the equally worried mother of José, the Overtons’ home phone rang. It was the police saying that her son was at the Fifth Precinct. There had been an altercation, she was told. No, no, no, no, no, Overton’s brain was practically screaming, not again, as she ran out the door and sped to the police station, a one-story tan brick building framed by Doric-style columns. A detective met her at the entrance and told her what Overton was not prepared to hear. There had been a murder last night, he said, and Christopher was implicated. Overton dropped to her knees, sobbing and yelling that her son was innocent. He didn’t do anything! I know he didn’t!
The police said she was not allowed to see her son, and so Overton, dejected and in so much pain that she felt as if she had been flayed, went home and waited for the call the detectives had told her she would soon receive from her son. She didn’t have to wait long.
Chris called and told her not to worry. All was well. Jeff had killed a man, but he, Chris, hadn’t done anything. No, he told her, he didn’t need a lawyer. He would be coming home the following day. I’m here only as a witness, he told her.
Overton called a lawyer anyway. It would prove to be a sound decision.
“My son has not been home since,” Overton told me, tears running down her cheeks, during an interview in her cozy home in the early fall of 2012, overlooking the marshlands in East Patchogue.
The Reverend Dwight Wolter woke up on the morning of November 9 somewhat tired and with a lot on his mind.5 He had gone to bed late but content after a peace concert in his church, the Congregational Church of Patchogue. Billed as a “World Peace Party,” the event had featured a drummer and high school kids who had built their own drums. They had sat and played in a giant drumming circle in the church, joined by members of the congregation and the community.6 This morning, Wolter had to deliver a sermon at 10:00 a.m., which he had titled “A New Heaven, a New Earth, a New Community, and a New Life.” Based on Revelation 21: 1–6, the sermon included prescient passages:
We need reminders that generations of our predecessors sacrificed and worked hard to make life easier for us. But over time, we have come to assume that our lives are (or should be) predictable and secure, and that our cherished routines should never be interrupted. We open the front door in the morning and the newspaper is always there.
But no matter how secure we try to make our existence, something eventually comes along to remind us just how tentative is our grasp on life as we know it. We are only one phone call, one lab test, or one news event away from the bottom falling out of our world. And chaos is always looking for an opportunity to threaten creation. Not one of us is completely safe. No one is immune to death.
As a single father of a twelve-year-old boy and the leader of a congregation of more than 360 members, Wolter was busy. In church by 9:00 a.m. most days, he didn’t really follow a routine. He worked seven days and two to four nights a week, though not all day or all night. His days were long but varied. A sick patient to visit, a concert to organize, a school meeting to attend, a fund-raiser to launch.
Staying busy was soothing for Wolter, fifty-eight, because for years he had led a troubled and painful life. A rare childhood syndrome had required him to use a wheelchair or a pair of crutches for the first five years of his life. His mother, herself disabled, blamed him for her inability to walk, and his father berated him constantly. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Wolter, though talented and ambitious, turned to alcohol and pills in his youth and dropped out of college. For twenty years, he lived in Manhattan and made a living as a maître d’ in restaurants such as Tavern on the Green and as the writer of six self-help books—three of which are on the topic of forgiveness. In his books, he has described his harrowing childhood and his path to recovery, as well as the lingering emotional scars of those early years.
He grew up without religion. The first time he entered a church he was thirty-four and couldn’t even understand the service, confused about what book to follow: the Psalter or the hymnal. In 1986, when he was thirty-six, he found a spiritual home in the Unitarian Church of All Souls on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the largest and mo
st influential congregations in the United States. The pastor there, Dr. Forrest Church, the son of former senator Frank Forrester Church III, must have seen through Wolter. After reading Wolter’s books, he suggested he enter the ministry. Wolter resisted at first, but soon came to understand that the message of self-empowerment that he preached in his books would be best expressed from the pulpit of a church.
Wolter finished his long-abandoned bachelor’s degree and then, three years after receiving his pastor’s advice, became a student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Upon graduation he was baptized as a Christian and ordained at the Riverside Church, a city landmark with a long history of social activism. Soon after, he became the pastor of a church in Florida.
When the opportunity to work in Patchogue came, he accepted the offer. After ten years in Florida, he was ready for a change. He had visited Patchogue in the spring of 2006, during the interview process, and was intrigued by what he had seen. In the shuttered downtown businesses he saw suburban blight. In the faces of people strolling Main Street in work clothes he saw the changing demographics of America. Patchogue would be a challenge, he knew, but also an opportunity to distance himself from very sad memories.
The previous year, his six-year-old daughter, Maya, had died in a car accident in Florida. When Wolter got to the hospital and saw his daughter’s body on a gurney, he fixated on her open blue eyes. Her beautiful eyes were among the few body parts not damaged by the crash. He ended up donating them along with her heart valves. A move to New York would allow him and his son, Casey, of whom he had custody after a divorce, to continue healing away from the sites that constantly reminded them of Maya’s death.
Wolter began his ministry in Patchogue in September 2006, and for more than two years Patchogue delivered exactly what Wolter had been looking for: some peace and healing but also the challenges of ministering to a mostly homogeneous congregation in a changing town.
He was proud of his church—the oldest in Patchogue, built in 1793—and of his congregation, which had been founded in 1773, three years before the Declaration of Independence was adopted. The church was made of brown stone, and some of its many stained-glass windows are rare, original Tiffany windows. In the afternoons, when the sun filtered through the windows, the walls of the church and of his office took on the colorful hues of the glass panes: pinks and blues and mauve mixed together with the blond wood of the altar and the benches. It was so beautiful that Wolter, who has the soul of an artist, saw the hand of God behind his move from Florida. Who, if not God, could have brought him to this place of beauty?
Yet certain things troubled him about his new home. For a man accustomed to enjoying the arts and a somewhat cosmopolitan life, Patchogue did not offer much. One of the most popular businesses on Main Street was a spanking new laundromat. Wolter had never felt farther from the city in his adult life. Paradoxically, he had felt closer to his idea of New York when he lived near Tampa or Daytona, in Florida, than now when he lived an hour’s drive from Manhattan.
He knew there was diversity in Patchogue. He could see a constant stream of Hispanics just by peering outside his office, but none were knocking on his door. He couldn’t understand how the village had not been altered by their presence. Where were the empanadas he liked to eat? The activities for and by Hispanics? Where did they live? It was as if two realities coexisted in Patchogue, one superimposed over the other, never really touching, never interacting. He figured things would have to change soon, but he wasn’t sure how.
Once, he had come up with an idea to hold an event in his church where people from all nationalities and creeds were invited to share a plate of food and a story. Wolter thought he would need about $3,000 for the event. He went around asking for money and got legislator Jack Eddington to commit to it, but to access public funds Wolter needed to find an organization that would allow him to use its tax-exempt 501c3 status. He couldn’t find any takers. Wolter concluded that Patchogue was just not ready to accept its own multicultural reality. Where do they think they are living? he wondered as he observed white ladies in their sweater sets and coiffed hair walking past his church and not even glancing at the workers walking alongside them. Whatever idea they had of Long Island, and, in particular, of their corner of the world in Suffolk County, Wolter knew the reality was something else. He feared that one day that reality would finally hit everyone in the face with such force that no one in Patchogue would be able to deny it anymore.
The day came sooner than Wolter could have anticipated.
Still in his pajamas in the early morning of November 9, Wolter poured himself a cup of coffee and turned on the television to watch the news. A news item stopped him: a Latino had been killed in Patchogue the night before. He didn’t know why, but his intuition told him that there was more to the story than what the reporter was saying. The assailants were already in custody, the reporter said, adding mistakenly that the seven were white.
White against brown, Wolter thought.
Without really thinking about what he would do next, Wolter grabbed a pair of pants and put them on over his pajamas. He got in the car and drove around, expecting the worst. If seven teenage Latinos had killed a white man, he knew, the streets would be burning already. He wanted to know how Patchogue was reacting to the news and he wanted to try to figure out who the murdered man was, where he lived.
But the streets were quiet. Where is everybody? he wondered. His phone rang. It was a friend who had more information than he did and directed him to the street where Lucero used to live. Wolter had never heard of the street, but he found it as soon as he turned a corner and noticed the news vans with their satellite antennas.
Reporters were milling around, and a group of Latino men crowded the sidewalk. One stood out among the others; his face was ashen and his eyes were red-rimmed. Wolter figured he was related to the victim and approached. He tried to get a conversation going, but, not knowing Spanish, he felt like an intruder. When a television camera began to trail him, he thought it was time to leave.
Back at the church, Wolter easily managed to work the events of the day into his prepared text, in which he reflected on the first sermon he had delivered in Patchogue. That first sermon was titled “Traditions and Transitions,” and in it he had explained how the best way to get through a transition was to root it in tradition. This time, he reminded his flock that their church, now his as well, had a long tradition of helping others in times of trouble. And the community was afflicted now, in need of help. Latinos were part of the community, everyone knew that, but did anybody in the church know any of them? Did they know their neighbors? The idea of lily-white Long Island was gone, he said, adding that he anticipated that the killing of the immigrant—Wolter didn’t know his name yet—would be a momentous event in the life of the village. His sermon also opened the door wide to the possibility—indeed, the necessity—of change:
Many people, even right here in church, see this as mere wishful thinking, the stuff of dreamers. They look around this pain-filled world and realize we have been waiting for shalom for over two thousand years and with a sigh they close the book on God’s promise to us. The chance of the dream coming true is simply too remote to get worked-up about.
But every new reality begins with a dream and a prayer. And so don’t talk to me about the statistical likelihood of success. There are too many awesome examples of lives, families, and communities transformed into places of peace. Despite strong opposition from some people, despite what we have been through, and despite awareness of how difficult spiritual work can be; many people simply will not abandon their dream. It is within the reach of the Congregational Church of Patchogue to build the church of our dreams, and to play an active part in the spiritual transformation of our church and community.
No one had mentioned the phrase “hate crime” to him yet, but to Wolter the hate portion of the crime was obvious. He had felt it brewing for a long time; it was almost predictable. Though he was sure he ha
d never heard about another Latino being attacked in Patchogue, even in Florida he had known about Farmingville and the animosity the events there had created in the entire region.
Later that day, he called Mayor Pontieri and told him he wanted to be helpful in any way he could.
Wolter wasn’t the only one who felt compelled to help, to do something, anything. The moment the live satellite trucks arrived on the morning of November 9, nearly everyone in Patchogue understood that they had only two options: hide from the glare of the cameras and go on with life as usual or face the cameras—and the world—and help the media shape a more complete, nuanced narrative of Patchogue. Most people were torn, but many chose the latter. It was as if a brutal action, such as the killing of a man because of his ethnicity, deserved an equally strong and physical response. But what to do?
Lola Quesada, a patrol officer in the Third Police Precinct, the precinct that covers some of the towns bordering Patchogue and Medford, thought she knew what to do when she read about the murder in the news. First, she sat down her boys—ages twenty-two, twenty, and nineteen—and asked them if they had ever been bullied or taunted or discriminated against because of their ethnicity. You know, she told them, this could have been you. They said they had seen others being bullied because of their poor language skills, but not them. Born in the United States, her children felt comfortable and untroubled by their own mixed background: Quesada is from Ecuador, and her husband’s grandparents were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Honduran, and English.7
The family lived about a fifteen-minute drive from Patchogue, but she had no idea that fellow Ecuadorians were being harassed in a place she considered idyllic to raise a family. It wasn’t as if she were naive to the perils of being an immigrant. When she had been pregnant with her first child, she and her husband had started looking for a house to buy. The broker kept taking them to see houses in low-income neighborhoods. The houses didn’t look right, Quesada remembers thinking. Aren’t there nicer houses for sale somewhere on Long Island? Then it dawned on her that they were being the victims of housing discrimination. She ditched the broker and found the house she wanted, brand-new and comfortable in an eastern Long Island town, where the majority of the residents are non-Hispanic whites and solidly middle class.
