Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  Praise for Hunting Season

  “An account that is as unflinching as it is important. Both an incisive reconstruction of a heartbreaking murder and an unsparing diagnosis of a national malady . . . with Hunting Season Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”

  —JUNOT DÍAZ, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  “Mirta Ojito tells a powerful story, connecting us with the real-life people who are all too often left out of the immigration debate. In doing so, Ojito plumbs the depths of what it means to be an American, a nation of immigrants, whose narrative and identity are deeply tied to this journey of arrival and assimilation—and sometimes rejection. This book should be required reading in any community grappling with the issues of immigration, which often remain abstract and divisive. Ojito helps us understand ourselves as a nation, whose motto, E pluribus unum, ‘Out of many, one,’ celebrates our unity in our diversity, as she does in this book. A powerful story, masterfully written, imbued with a deep, compassionate, and healing intelligence.”

  —JULIA ALVAREZ, author of A Wedding in Haiti

  “An Ecuadorean immigrant’s ethnically motivated murder is at the heart of Mirta Ojito’s compelling and complex narrative; but beyond laying down the tragic machinations of prejudice, she gives us an uplifting tale about the universality—and wonder—of ordinary folk—in this case, Latinos—pursuing the American dream. All this is told with the authority of a much-respected journalist, whose own experience as an immigrant lends this book the depth, insights, and poignancy that only someone of her experience can convincingly—and rightfully—convey.”

  —OSCAR HIJUELOS, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of

  The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

  “Through a powerful and true story, Hunting Season brings to life how an all-American town confronts immigration. This book reveals not only the shortcomings of our immigration system but also reminds us how we might think of each other and how we treat all of our neighbors, whether or not they look like us. This is our human story.”

  —WES MOORE, author of The Other Wes Moore

  “With the hyperbolic rhetoric of immigration spewing from every medium, we forget that there are dreams on both sides of the divide that has cleaved United States society and threatens our sense of self. Respected journalist Mirta Ojito writes about immigration from the perspective of those who have lived it: from the Italian-descendant mayor of Patchogue to a naturalized waiter from Colombia, from undocumented Ecuadorean laborers to teenagers pumped on adrenaline with not enough to do on a fall night—to heartbroken parents on two continents. This is an important book. I couldn’t put it down.”

  —ESMERALDA SANTIAGO, author of When I Was Puerto Rican

  HUNTING SEASON

  Immigration and Murder

  in an All-American Town

  MIRTA OJITO

  BEACON PRESS · BOSTON

  For my children:

  Juan Arturo, Lucas, and Marcelo,

  Americans in the truest sense of the word.

  And for my father,

  Orestes Ojito,

  who made it all possible.

  Hate, as a single word might lead us to believe, is not a single emotion or behavior, but instead stands for a variety of complex psychological phenomena that can be expressed in many different ways by different people. Why some people express “hate” in the form of criminal behavior is something that we do not yet fully understand.

  NATHAN HALL, HATE CRIME

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Note

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  A Bloody Knife

  CHAPTER 2

  Painted Birds in the Air

  CHAPTER 3

  Welcome to Patchogue

  CHAPTER 4

  Not in My Backyard

  CHAPTER 5

  Beaner Jumping

  CHAPTER 6

  Unwanted

  CHAPTER 7

  A Murder in the Suburbs

  CHAPTER 8

  A Torn Community

  CHAPTER 9

  A Little Piece of Heaven

  CHAPTER 10

  Trial and Punishment

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  To re-create events that transpired fifty, twenty, or five years ago is always an act of faith that depends mostly—but not only—on the kindness of those who witnessed the events and on their willingness to share. The other way to re-create events is following a paper trail, and I’ve made liberal use of that option, mining court records, transcripts, and news accounts.

  I’m lucky and grateful that many people in Patchogue, New York, and Gualaceo, Ecuador, shared their stories with me. I asked them to remember in great detail events that happened years before we met. Since it is difficult to recall precise details of conversations held so long ago, I’ve opted not to use quotation marks unless I’m quoting from a published or aired source, such as a newspaper story or a TV clip, using transcripts of interviews, confessions, or court proceedings, or referring to notes I took when the words were uttered.

  Only nine people know what happened on the night of November 8, 2008. One who knew—Marcelo Lucero—is dead; his friend, Angel Loja, spoke to me. But the seven young men who are still in prison for attacking Lucero and Loja and killing Lucero refused to, as did all their parents but two—Bob Conroy, the father of Jeffrey Conroy, and Denise Overton, the mother of Christopher Overton. Their cooperation allowed me to convey a more nuanced portrayal of their children.

  From prison, Jeffrey Conroy wrote me a letter, which for more than a year I kept on my bulletin board, next to the picture of a serious-looking Lucero as a fourth-grade student in Ecuador, his body partly blocking a map of North America. In his letter, dated July 16, 2011, Conroy wrote that he believed I would “write a fair book” and that my work would be “balanced and respectful.” For more than three years I’ve labored to live up to that expectation and to honor the stories of those in Patchogue and Gualaceo who opened their lives to my curiosity and scrutiny.

  PROLOGUE

  On November 8, 2008, having had a few beers and an early dinner, Marcelo Lucero, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, took a late-night stroll with his childhood friend Angel Loja near the train tracks in Patchogue, a seaside village of twelve thousand people in Suffolk County, New York, a county that only three years earlier had been touted by Forbes magazine as one of the safest and wealthiest in the United States.1 It is also one of the most segregated counties.2

  Before the mild moonlit night was over, Lucero was stabbed and killed by a gaggle of teenagers from neighboring towns, who had gone out hunting for “beaners,” the slur that, as some of them later told police, they used for Latinos. Earlier that night, they had harassed and beaten another Hispanic man—a naturalized US citizen from Colombia named Héctor Sierra. The teenagers also confessed to attacking Hispanics at least once a week.

  Lucero was not the first immigrant killed by an enraged mob in the United States, and he most certainly will not be the last. At least two other immigrants were killed in the Northeast in 2008, but Lucero’s case is especially poignant because he was killed by a high school star athlete in an all-American town where people of mostly Italian and Irish descent proudly display US flags on the Fourth of July and every year attend a Christmas parade on Main Street. If it happened here, it can happen anywhere.

  Patchogue, in central Long Island, is only about sixty miles from Manhattan—far enough to escape the city’s noise, dirt, and angst, but close enough to feel splashes of its excitement, pluck, and glamour. Lucero, who probably didn’t know about the Forbes ranking of the village as an idyllic place t
o live and raise children, had come from Ecuador to Patchogue in 1993 on the heels of others from his hometown who for thirty years now have been slowly and quietly making their way to this pocket of lush land named by the Indians who once inhabited it.

  In Ecuador, too, Lucero had lived in a small village called Gualaceo. The town has lost so many of its people to Patchogue that those who remain call it Little Patchogue, a way to honor the dollars flowing there from Long Island. Month by month, remittances from New York have helped Gualaceños prosper despite a profound and long-lasting national economic crisis that forced the government to toss its national currency and adopt the US dollar more than a decade ago.

  The day before he was killed, Lucero, thirty-seven, had been talking about going home. Over the years he had sent his family about $100,000—money earned working low-paying jobs—to buy land and build a three-story house he planned to share with his mother, his sister, and his nephew. He was eager to join them. The sister, Rosario, had asked him to be a father figure for her son. It’s time to go, Lucero told his younger brother, Joselo, who also lived in Patchogue.3

  “He was tired,” Joselo recalled. “He had done enough.”

  Lucero was planning to leave before Christmas, an early present for their ailing mother. I’ll take you to the airport, Joselo promised. He never got the chance.

  I read about the murder of Marcelo Lucero when it was first reported in the news, but I learned some of the more intimate details through a Columbia University graduate student, Angel Canales, who had immediately jumped on the story and was working on a documentary about it for his master’s thesis. The story resonated with me for several reasons, not the least of them being my own condition as an immigrant. Though I never felt the burden of being in the country “illegally,” I have carried a different kind of stigma.

  I came from Cuba in 1980, at sixteen, aboard a boat named Mañana, as part of a boatlift that brought more than one hundred twenty-five thousand Cuban refugees from the port of Mariel to the shores of South Florida in the span of five months. Several thousand of those refugees had committed crimes in Cuba and kept at it in their new country. Quickly, quicker than I could learn English or even understand what was happening around me, all of us were tainted by the unspeakable actions of a few. We became saddled with the label “Marielitos,” which carried a negative connotation, and with the narrative of Scarface, the unfortunate but popular film by Brian De Palma in which Al Pacino played a “Marielito” drug lord. It was a difficult stigma to shake. In 2005, when a book I wrote about the boatlift was published, people still felt the need to point to my story as a rarity—a successful “Marielita” who had done well and had even made it to the New York Times.

  In fact, the opposite was true. My story was not unique. Most Mariel refugees were honest, decent, hard-working people. The exceptions had given us all a bad name. Those experiences taught me what it’s like to live under the shadow of an unpopular label, and while “illegal” is not as detrimental as “criminal,” it is close, and it has endured far longer than the “Marielito” curse.

  The murder of Marcelo Lucero also resonated with me for a professional reason. It brought back memories of a story I had written for the New York Times on September 30, 1996, about a Hudson Valley village called Haverstraw, where, according to the 1990 census, 51 percent of the residents were Hispanic, although everyone knew the ratio was closer to 70 percent. Just thirty miles north of Manhattan, Haverstraw had been a magnet for Puerto Ricans since the 1940s. In more recent years, Dominicans had followed. The mayor, Francis “Bud” Wassmer, told me he no longer recognized the village where he had been born and raised. The public library carried an extensive selection of bilingual books, a local store that once sold men’s suits was selling work boots, the strains of merengue spilled from the pink windows of riverfront Victorian mansions, and the old candy store had closed down while eighteen bodegas had opened.

  My story included the following paragraphs:

  The suburbs, long the refuge of fleeing city dwellers, are quietly becoming a magnet to newly arrived immigrants, who, lured by relatives and the promise of a better life, are bypassing the city and driving to the proverbial American dream straight from the nation’s biggest international airports.

  The trend, entrenched everywhere there is a significant immigrant population, is transforming the character of many suburbs, sociologists and demographers say. It is making suburbia more heterogeneous and interesting. But, like never before, it is also pressing onto unprepared suburban towns the travails and turmoil of the cities.

  New immigrants, unlike immigrants who have lived in the country for a while, have special needs. They are likely not to speak English. They need jobs, help in finding affordable homes, guidance to enroll their children in schools, and information on how to establish credit and even open a checking account. They may also need public assistance to make ends meet until they find jobs. And they need it all in their own language.

  Cities, where immigrants traditionally settled, have the services and the expertise to help new immigrants make a smoother transition to life in America. Places like the village of Haverstraw are not always fully equipped to deal with the needs of new immigrants.

  “We have social problems just like urban communities,” Mr. [Ronaldo] Figueroa said, “but we don’t have the resources to address them in the same way, so they tend to accelerate at a greater pace than we can keep up with.”4

  Throughout the piece, I quoted the work of Richard D. Alba and John R. Logan, both sociology professors at the State University of New York at Albany, who had been researching how members of minority groups get along in suburbs of New York City, Chicago, Miami, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

  “The question is how are they going to meet the needs of these new immigrants in a suburban environment?” Professor Logan told me. “This is very new for suburbia and it poses a challenge to public institutions.”

  Twelve years later, when I heard about Lucero, I thought of Professors Logan and Alba, and I remembered the words of Mayor Wassmer, who told me that one of the problems he had with Hispanics in Haverstraw was that they produced a lot of garbage. Perplexed, I asked what he was referring to. He replied, “I mean, rice and beans are heavy, you know.” The other problem, as he saw it, was that Hispanics tended to walk in the streets and congregate at night by the tenuous light of the village’s old lampposts.

  In fact, Lucero had been taking a stroll when he was attacked by seven teenagers and killed. Was it unusual in the village of Patchogue for people to walk late at night in its deserted streets? Was anyone there threatened by two Latino men out for a stroll? Was this the challenge that Logan had talked about, the turmoil that Figueroa had envisioned? The “problems” that the mayor had been able to discuss only by referring to garbage?

  The Haverstraw story had always felt unfinished. As many reporters do, I had swooped in to collect information, filed a story, and moved on to the next assignment. I had never followed up. Patchogue, I thought, was my chance to connect the dots, to explore what could have happened—but, to my knowledge, never did—in Haverstraw.

  That Lucero had been killed in a town so close to New York City and by youngsters who are only two or three generations removed from their own immigrant roots came as a shock even to those who for years have known that there was trouble brewing under the tranquil surface of suburbia.

  “It’s like we heard the bells but we didn’t know if Mass was beginning or ending,” said Paul Pontieri Jr., the village’s mayor, who keeps in his office a photo of his Italian grandfather paving the roads of Patchogue. “I heard but I didn’t listen. I wish I had.”5

  But the killing did not surprise experts who track hate crimes and who knew that attacks against Hispanic immigrants had increased 40 percent between 2003 and 2007.6 According to the FBI, in 2008, crimes against Hispanics represented 64 percent of all ethnically motivated attacks.7

  In the two years that followed Lucero’s death, h
ate crime reports in Suffolk County increased 30 percent, a ratio closely aligned with national trends.8 It is unclear whether more attacks have taken place or if more victims, emboldened by the Lucero case, have come forward with their own tales of abuse.

  Lucero’s murder, as well as the growing number of attacks against other immigrants, illustrates the angst that grips the country regarding immigration, raising delicate and serious questions that most people would prefer to ignore. What makes us Americans? What binds us together as a nation? How do we protect what we know, what we own? How can young men still in high school feel so protective of their turf and so angry toward newcomers that they can commit the ultimate act of violence, taking a life that, to them, was worthless because it was foreign?

  Global movement—how to stimulate it and how to harness it—is the topic of this century. Few issues in the world today are as crucial and defining as how to deal with the seemingly endless flow of immigrants making their way to wealthier countries. Even the war against terrorism, which since 9/11 has become especially prominent, has been framed as an immigration challenge: who comes in, who stays out.

  The relentless flow of immigrants impacts the languages we speak (consider the ongoing debate over bilingual education and the quiet acceptance in major cities, such as Miami and New York, of the predominance of Spanish), the foods we eat, the people we hire, the bosses we work for, and even the music we dance to. On a larger scale, immigrants affect foreign policy, the debate over homeland security, local and national politics, budget allocations, the job market, schools, and police work. No institution can ignore the role immigrants now play in shaping the daily life of most industrialized countries of the world.

  In the United States immigration is at the heart of the nation’s narrative and sense of identity. Yet we continue to be conflicted by it: armed vigilantes patrol the Rio Grande while undocumented workers find jobs every day watching over our children or delivering food to our door. In 2011 members of Congress considered debating if the US-born children of undocumented immigrants ought to be rightful citizens of the country, while in Arizona Latino studies were declared illegal.