Hunting Season
Page 19
Downes quoted Pontieri, who told him the meeting should have been held in the library, the main gathering place for Patchogue’s Latino population, and without reporters. But Spota, the district attorney, seemed to find the activity fruitful. He told Downes that he saw seventy-five to one hundred people filing through the church to tell their stories, and he was expecting to be able to gather a few useful accounts of unreported assaults.23 In the end, Wolter said, fifty-three people spoke about having been attacked or harassed in Patchogue and other areas nearby. A week or so later, prosecutors showed up at the church with a subpoena for the recordings. They took away all the recordings. Wolter said he felt relieved.24
With so much media attention, people in Patchogue began to feel they were under siege. Reporters just would not go away (three separate documentary crews had started filming almost from the start). Latinos were emboldened, but also scared and outraged. Non-Latinos were defensive, and also scared and outraged. What had happened to their village and when would they get it back? When would things go back to normal? The guilt and the shock took many shapes. County executive Steve Levy, in a surprise statement, referred to Lucero’s assailants as “white supremacists,” without any evidence to support his claim, just as earlier he had described immigration advocates as “communists.”
Michael Mostow, the superintendent of Patchogue-Medford School District, called the attack “an aberration” and told the press there were no racial issues or divisions in the high school the teenagers attended,25 but Manuel J. Sanzone, the son and grandson of Italian immigrants and the principal of the Patchogue-Medford High School, took precautions nonetheless. He mobilized a mini-lockdown at the school, which meant that backpacks were checked and extra security personnel patrolled the halls. Four days after the murder, he spoke to his students. “I told them that how they handle this, and what they learn from it, becomes a part of their character,” he explained to a New York Times reporter, “and that even if they feel afraid for classmates who were involved in it, they should never forget that there was a victim here.”26
About five weeks after Lucero’s death, a school board meeting ended in a shouting match as parents and board members traded insults. At issue was the infamous hallway that housed English-as-a-second-language classrooms. It was here that Hispanic students tended to congregate. A girl who spoke in favor of the ESL classes was booed off the stage and had to leave the meeting.27 The parents of white non-Hispanic students complained that after the murder the hall was “unsafe” for their children, as they, not the Latino students, were now the subject of harassment. But Mostow and other board members said the students themselves had not complained and assured the parents that their children were safe. At that point, a North Patchogue resident named Bill Pearson suggested that perhaps the best solution was to eliminate ESL classes. His suggestion provoked some anger, which led to the shouting match and to Mostow calling Pearson “a racist.” Pearson demanded an apology, but Mostow shouted back, “Not to you, racist!” Pearson told a Newsday reporter he planned to contact a lawyer.28
In one of my meetings with Conroy, he mentioned that his daughter too was afraid to walk down the “Spanish” hall.
There were candlelit vigils in the dead of winter for Lucero and a lot of support for his family, while Loja quietly disappeared into the background. Reporters wanted to speak with him, but he shunned them all.
Jack Eddington and others started to organize a community soccer tournament where all ethnicities were invited. The Latino team lost in the first tournament, in 2009, but the event served to build some bridges and it felt good to be playing out in the open. A writer’s workshop promoted writing as a way to fight hate in the community, bringing together Spanish-speaking and English-speaking women who had stories to tell.29 An Ecuadorian filmmaker on Long Island made a short film inspired by the case, Taught to Hate, which was shown at the Long Island International Film Expo.30 And a Stony Brook University student won an essay contest for writing an analysis of the articles about Lucero and his killers that appeared in major news publications. He received a full semester’s worth of in-state tuition at the university.31
Diane Berthold, a local designer with myriad health problems but a can-do attitude, began a quilt project. She got together with several other women who also felt the need to create something beautiful and permanent. The Healing Hands & Mending Hearts Quilt Project was born, eventually yielding three quilts from different community groups. The quilts were unveiled in 2010 at the Patchogue American Legion Post.32 Later they were displayed in an empty storefront on South Ocean Avenue, a stone’s throw away from the corner where Jeff and the others were arrested.
The Lucero Foundation was launched to bring Latinos together in Patchogue. It held monthly meetings in an unheated room on the second floor of a building on Main Street. Schools began to offer Spanish-language classes for adults who wanted to learn the language to communicate with their neighbors. And the area where Lucero was killed—at the intersection of Railroad Avenue, Funaro Court, and Sephton Street—was optimistically and prematurely renamed Unity Place just two months after the Southern Poverty Law Center, an influential civil rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama, released a scathing report titled Climate of Fear: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. The report found that Lucero’s murder was the result of “nativist intolerance and hate violence” that had been festering for years in Suffolk County. In particular, it blamed local officials for fostering such an environment and Steve Levy for minimizing the murder by calling it a “one-day story.”33
The report also detailed thirty-five attacks against Hispanic immigrants in Suffolk County from June 1, 1999, to November 8, 2008. In 2008 alone, at least fourteen immigrants, mostly Ecuadorians, were attacked or harassed in Patchogue.34 Yet few had dared to call the police, for two reasons: they worried about getting deported and they had been told by others who had already been through the same ordeal that the police never did anything because the youths were minors. After Lucero’s murder, and until August 2009, seven other attacks were reported, two of them in Patchogue. The victims of the latter two attacks—two men in one incident and one man in the other—told police that they were attacked by teenagers. At least some of the teenagers told their victims that they wanted “to kill a Hispanic.”35
The Ecuadorian consulate in New York encouraged immigrants to come forward to speak of their abuse and harassment, and hate crime reports increased nearly 30 percent in the county. The consulate also began a program to help Ecuadorians assimilate faster to suburbia, teaching them, among other things, about the illegality of littering and of drinking in public—the very kind of practical education Eddington had long been advocating for.36
In Gualaceo, Doña Rosario told reporters that she would like to come to New York to face her son’s attackers, not to show any hatred—she felt none—but to show them that the man they had killed had a mother who loved him very much.
“I just want to see their faces,” she told Newsday. “I don’t want to hurt them. But I want them to see he had a mother here waiting for him. I want them to put their hand on my heart and feel the enormous damage they have caused this family.”37
Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican playwright, wrote What Killed Marcelo Lucero? which premiered in 2009 at Hofstra University. There were a dozen actors, most with no experience or training, in the play, which portrayed real events and characters surrounding the murder, including an anti-immigrant politician, day laborers, a white non-Hispanic family, and a Hispanic family. Much of the dialogue came from news accounts.38 It played in different venues on Long Island until, one day in the spring of 2011, it came to Patchogue.
There were about two hundred people in the audience, which was white and Latino, young and old. The bilingual play felt more like a conversation starter than a work of art. It had no ending, and Espada said she had left it open because the ending was yet to be written. It was up to the people of Suffolk County to write it.
Except for his jaws furiously working the gum, Conroy didn’t move. At the end, the actors gathered on the stage around a casket surrounded by all the flags of Latin America. They brought it down to the audience. Then Espada interrupted. “Stop!” she ordered, addressing the actors. Turning to the audience, she asked, “How can we create a dialogue?”
Luis Valenzuela, the immigration advocate, spoke first and reminded the audience that during the year that Lucero was killed, six anti-immigrant bills had been introduced in the legislature. One college professor said that after Lucero was killed, he had been afraid of being Latino, for the first time in his life.
A few other people spoke, and then Conroy asked for the microphone. Everyone turned to face him, and a hush descended in the theater. It was the first time he had publicly spoken since his son had been arrested. He cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry for what happened, but I felt that the problems of a nation fell on a seventeen-year-old child,” he said, repeating the theme that seems to fuel his anger.
Then he went on, in a somewhat rambling but seemingly heartfelt talk.
“At seventeen you can’t drink, you can’t drive alone. He dated a Spanish girl. My first wife was Spanish. This has opened my eyes. You guys [actors] did a good job, but I take exception to one thing: it was not in the heart,” he said, referring to the wound on Lucero’s torso, which in fact had been closer to the shoulder than the chest. “It was considered a nonthreatening wound that wasn’t treated for forty minutes.”
Valenzuela interrupted him to say, “I support you one hundred percent in that it wasn’t your son alone. This is society’s issue.”
Conroy said he was “livid” that his son had been described in the papers as a “ringleader.” “It could have been any of your children,” he said to the audience that remained riveted by his words.
“Absolutely,” Valenzuela agreed.
“Know the facts before you label somebody,” Conroy said before sitting down eight minutes after he took the microphone.
There was a smattering of applause, but a man in the audience got up and urged everyone not to forget that there was only one victim in the attack against Lucero, and that victim was not Jeffrey Conroy; it was Marcelo Lucero. Toward the end of the evening, Reverend Wolter, who had encouraged Conroy to attend the event, said he was pleased with the way it had turned out. “For the first time in this community everyone had a seat at the table,” he said.
But not everyone was at the table that evening; the Lucero family did not attend.
On the evening of February 16, 2009, Doña Rosario arrived in New York City to see her surviving son, Joselo, and to attend hearings scheduled before the trials of the teenagers accused of killing her son. It was the first time she traveled outside Ecuador.
She arrived at JFK Airport, accompanied by her daughter, Isabel, and her grandson, three-year-old Isaac. Crying and shaking, she clung to Joselo, who was waiting with a bouquet of white roses and eucalyptus. The two were speechless for several minutes, but nearby reporters could hear Joselo’s tear-choked whispers, “Mi mamá, mi mamá.”
Joselo took off his black jacket and delicately draped it around his mother’s small frame. The family left the airport in a car driven by Sgt. Lola Quesada, who now worked as a police liaison to the Latino community and had gained enormous relevance in the community in the days immediately following Lucero’s death.39
Nine months later, in November 2009, Doña Rosario was back to mark the first anniversary of her son’s death at an inter-faith service in St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue. Surprising everyone in the church, Steve Levy approached the Lucero family in their front pew and spoke to them quietly. He said he was sorry for their loss and thanked Joselo for speaking out about his brother. Joselo just nodded. A picture taken by a Newsday photographer shows Doña Rosario bundled in an oversized dark coat, shaking Levy’s outstretched hand. Officer Quesada is between the two, most likely translating. Joselo Lucero stares straight ahead with hands deep in his pant pockets.
When it was his time to speak during the service, Joselo addressed Levy directly. “You have a second chance to change, to do what you did wrong before, to now do better things.” This time it was Levy who stared straight ahead.40
Afterward, Mayor Pontieri told reporters he had arranged for Levy to come to the service. He admitted that he should have alerted the Lucero family, but said he had not thought about it.
Joselo was fuming.
“I feel like I was ambushed here,” he said. “There are people I don’t want to talk to.”
Two months later, the people’s case against Jeffrey Conroy reached the courtroom of New York Supreme Court judge Robert W. Doyle in Riverhead, Long Island.
CHAPTER 10
TRIAL AND PUNISHMENT
The night before, the attorney laid out her new black suit, the one she had bought especially for this trial. After eighteen months of preparation, countless hours poring over documents, and entire weekends spent thinking up strategies and opening arguments, it had come down to superstition: Megan O’Donnell, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County with twelve years of experience, always wore black the first and last day of a trial. She felt it brought her good luck. With the Lucero case, she needed it.1
Much more than the fate of a young man was at stake in this case. What would it telegraph to the world if in Suffolk County, Long Island, a bunch of kids could get away with the murder of an undocumented immigrant? With so much media attention surrounding the case, at times it seemed as if the whole world was watching, which was not entirely true. For the most part, the coverage was local, about half of it from Spanish-language media outlets, though reporters from as far away as Amsterdam had shown a fleeting interest in the story in the days after the murder. But advocacy groups—both local and national—as well as the federal government were certainly paying attention. On September 1, 2009, six months before the first day of the trial, the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York initiated a joint investigation of the Suffolk County Police Department. O’Donnell, of course, was aware that her case was in the spotlight. Something Jeffrey Conroy had boasted to his friends right after the stabbing remained on her mind: “Imagine if I get away with this?”2 She didn’t think of Jeff and the other six who had been arraigned as young men who had made a mistake. Their behavior had been gang-like, she thought, and her job was to stop gangs from terrorizing the place she called home.
Megan O’Donnell was born in Patchogue. Her father, a banker, is an immigrant from Canada. Her mother, a legal secretary, is from North Carolina. When O’Donnell was seven, the family moved to Virginia. She became interested in law in eighth grade, when a teacher organized a mock Revolutionary War trial. O’Donnell played the lawyer representing the Americans. She lost her case but to this day thinks she should have won.
O’Donnell started college in Virginia, but midway through returned to New York and finished her political science degree at Stony Brook University. Her law degree is from Hofstra University, also on Long Island. She was ambivalent at first as to what role she would play as a lawyer upon graduation, but in the summer after her first year of law school an internship at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office led to her decision to become a prosecutor. O’Donnell graduated in May, took the bar exam in August, and the following month began working in the Suffolk County District Court prosecuting misdemeanors.
Her first trial involved a woman who had been inappropriately groped in a restaurant kitchen where she worked, but O’Donnell quickly moved on to the Major Crimes Bureau, prosecuting felonies such as burglary, rape, and murder. After three years, she was assigned to the special investigations unit, prosecuting gun-related and gang violence. The assignment was random, but it became a passion for her, and she stayed for seven years. By her own account she is very focused, organized, methodical, analytical, and determined. In college, she took up running and is still at it, usually jogging at 5:00 a.m. four days a week.
It surprised no one when O’Donnell’s boss, District Attorney Thomas Spota, assigned her Jeffrey Conroy’s prosecution. At the time, she was one of 185 assistant district attorneys in the county, but one of only about twelve who could handle a homicide case.
As O’Donnell wrestled with the case, the biggest issue was not Jeff’s culpability. Despite the fact that no one, not even Angel Loja, had seen him plunge the knife into Lucero’s upper torso, the evidence pointed to him and so did his own confession. Age was not a problem either because in New York State anyone over sixteen can be tried as an adult. Jeff was seventeen at the time of the attack. If there would be any leniency in his case, it would have to come from the judge at the time of sentencing if Jeff were found guilty, not from the district attorney’s office.
There was no question about the nature of the crime either. All the boys had confessed to attacking Lucero and Loja because of their ethnicity. During the confessions, the young men had not said why they had gone out that night to pick on Hispanic men, but during their interviews with prosecutors and with probation department officers they had revealed somewhat of a motivation. Their statements varied, but they all shared fears that immigrants were taking jobs away from US citizens, enrolling in schools, and therefore causing tax money to be used in programs such as teaching teachers to speak Spanish, and not paying taxes into the system. O’Donnell had heard it all before. Her sense was that the kids were mirroring what their parents believed, what they said most nights around the dinner table.3 In an incident file report prepared shortly after his arrest, Jeff is quoted as saying that though he didn’t consider himself a “white supremacist” and didn’t belong to any such group, he followed white supremacist activities on the Internet and held “racist thoughts,” having been “raised in a home where his parents held racist beliefs.”4 (Conroy vehemently disputes this and doubts that his son could have said any such thing.)