Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  McLeer, who had been a cop for twenty-one years and a detective for the last thirteen of those, wanted more information and asked the question differently. Later, in court, he explained his interviewing method: “A good interview is ideally a conversation, and ideally the person you’re talking to is doing most of the talking, giving you information.”

  That he did. Jeff remained calm and was cooperative. If he was afraid, he didn’t show it. He was subdued and chatty as he related the events of that night: from his visit to Alyssa’s house earlier in the evening to the get-together in the Medford train station and the park and eventually the decision to go “fuck up some Mexicans.”

  As McLeer teased information out of Jeff, he studied him carefully. He noticed a red spot—a fresh injury, it seemed—on the top of his head and saw that his knuckles were slightly swollen and bloody, as if he had been in a fight.

  “Hey, Jeff, did you hit the guy?” McLeer asked.

  But Jeff said his swollen knuckles and bloody hands were the result of his roughing around earlier that evening with his friend, Felicia, at the train station. He said he must have scraped them on the ground. On his right index finger, there was a Band-Aid. Jeff had an explanation for that too. On Friday, he said, he’d had a fight with one of his best friends, Roman.

  “Hey, Jeff, why would you be fighting with your best friend?” McLeer asked.

  “Same reason I’m here now, because I’m a fucking asshole.”

  McLeer directed the conversation back to the stabbing. “How did you wind up down in Patchogue? Again, how did you wind up with me here this morning?”

  So Jeff explained about getting into Jordan’s car and heading for Patchogue, and how Kuvan and Anthony had started to hit “the guy”—at that point Jeff didn’t know the name of the man he had stabbed. He mentioned the swinging belt and said that he had been hit by the buckle. Since he didn’t want to get hit again, he took his knife out and stabbed the man.

  “I stabbed him once in the shoulder, I think,” he said.

  He described the knife. He said it was black and that he had found it in a hotel room and that his parents knew he had it.

  McLeer asked if he had ever been arrested before. Jeff said “almost,” and “for the same shit,” which he described as “Mexican hopping.”

  McLeer pressed him for details, and Jeff revealed how on Monday of the week that had just ended, accompanied by Kuvan, Anthony, and José, he had “knocked out cold” a Hispanic man on Jamaica Avenue. On that occasion, it was José who threw the punch, Jeff said. The cops had arrived, but the victim refused to press charges.

  “Jeff, do you and your friends just go around kicking the shit out of Mexicans for nothing or beating the shit out of Mexicans for nothing?” McLeer asked. Jeff said he didn’t, but Kuvan did and he added that he, Jeff, was “an asshole for getting involved.”

  He also admitted that he had gone “looking for Spanish people to beat up before,” not just a week earlier on Jamaica Avenue.

  That first part of the interview lasted forty minutes. At 4:05 a.m., the detectives put the handcuffs back on Jeff and stepped out of the room to take a break and to share with their immediate supervisor the confession they already had. In less than ten minutes, they went back in. Once again, they took off the handcuffs and this time asked Jeff if he would be willing to give them a written statement. Once again, they read Jeff his rights. Jeff waved them off and signed his initials, indicating that he understood he didn’t have to say anything and that he had rights. And he kept talking.

  At 4:15 a.m., the detectives began composing Jeff’s “written statement” out of the notes they had taken from the initial interview, with additional information asked, as needed. The detectives asked him to read and initial any changes. Toward the end of his statement, Jeff said something curious: “I don’t blame the Spanish guy [Lucero] for swinging the belt at us. It was obvious he wanted to get the fuck out of there. He was ready to defend himself, but we just didn’t back down.” It is clear that, for the briefest time, in the heat of their fierce and uneven encounter, Jeff had felt something akin to admiration for a man he knew only as a “beaner.”

  Once Jeff signed his confession, McLeer went to his gun locker and retrieved the knife, which was inside a latex glove to preserve DNA and fingerprints. He showed it to Jeff, who recognized it as his. At 6:50 a.m., they were done. The handcuffs went back around Jeff’s wrists and around the chain that kept him tethered to the table. Then the detectives left the room. Six other teenagers needed to be interviewed.

  By that time, McLeer and Faughnan had already spoken to a shaken Loja, whose first question had been, “How’s my friend?”

  “I’m sorry,” one of them told him. “Your friend passed away. He’s dead.”15

  When Loja heard the news he felt angry, but then, more than anything else, he felt sadness. Overwhelming sadness. Just a few hours before, he had gone shopping with Lucero, they had shared a meal and drinks, they had talked about the future, about life and work and home. Now, sitting alone under the unnaturally bright lights of a police station in a town where he felt he was no longer welcomed, Loja pondered how he could go on when the very color of his skin, the language he spoke, the slant of his eyes, and the texture of his hair had turned him into the victim of a hate crime.

  Everything he had ever suspected or feared about the United States had just come true in one terrible, terrible moment in which he had lost not only his innocence but also his best friend. He thought of his journey of eighteen days from Gualaceo to New York, the hours of thirst and hunger crossing the desert, the nights when he thought he couldn’t possibly survive such perilous conditions. He also thought of what his life had been since he had left home: a succession of poorly paid jobs, abusive comments from insensitive bosses, and resentful stares from some people who hadn’t adapted to the idea of seeing Latinos walking down Main Street. Did they belong there? Did he? Did he really belong in a place so far from home? Perhaps it was time to give up the American dream.

  All he knew that night as he contemplated his callous hands—still red with Lucero’s blood—was that his friend was dead and that his own life had changed. He would no longer be an anonymous immigrant trying to make a living in a New York suburb. From now on, he intuited, he would be known as the man who was with Marcelo Lucero the night he was killed, the man who had been unable to keep Lucero alive.

  “Kuvan and I probably started the whole thing,” Anthony Hartford, who was a big seventeen-year-old at about six foot one and 175 pounds, told detectives during his confession. “Kuvan hit one of them in the face and he started bleeding a lot. I swung at the other guy and missed.”

  Anthony said that he and Kuvan had been hanging out together since the early evening of November 8, along with another friend named Bobby. Jordan had later joined them and given them a ride to the Medford train station. On the way to the station, where they met the others, they had stopped at a gas station by the Long Island Expressway and bought an eighteen-pack of Budweiser.

  He also said that the last time he had been out “jumping beaners” had been five days earlier. On Monday, November 3, he, with José and Kuvan, had attacked a “beaner” on Jamaica Avenue. José had punched the man so hard he “knocked him out,” Anthony said, and he added a chilling thought: “I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe only once a week.”

  Kuvan’s confession closely mirrored that of Anthony. Both of them referred to Christopher Overton as “a kid named Chris,” making it clear he was not a part of their group. Kuvan too took responsibility for the events of that night, saying that it had been he, Anthony, and Nick who had started talking about “looking for people to fight.” He said they had been looking for “beaners to fuck up,” and he readily acknowledged that, later that night, he had been the one who threw the first punch, the punch that made Lucero bleed. But he also said that, after the punch, he had started to walk back toward the parking lot. It was then he had realized that the “Spanish gu
ys” had taken off their belts and that one of them—the one he had “snuffed”—was swinging the belt over his head.

  If he had been thinking of leaving, seeing the swinging belt made him change his mind, because Kuvan said he then yelled to the others “to surround the guy and try to control him.” Kuvan also told detectives that he had seen Jeff run toward the guy he had punched, but, like Anthony, he didn’t see the actual stabbing. All he knew was that the fight stopped shortly after that.

  “The guy was walking back into the street and he had a lot more blood on him, far more than when I punched him in the mouth,” Kuvan said. “As we walked towards the SUV I thought we might get away, but Chris pointed out a video camera and within seconds a police car rolled up on us.”

  Kuvan was candid about his participation in past beatings of Hispanics. “I have been involved in beatings like this before but no one ever used a knife. We would just beat people up.” As Anthony also did, Kuvan described the beating of a Hispanic man the Monday before, on Jamaica Avenue. But, unlike Anthony, he said that Jeff had been there as well, along with three other young men who had not been mentioned before. He was clear on one detail: on that occasion, “Anthony, José and I knocked out a Spanish guy.”16

  The “Spanish guy” who was knocked out on Jamaica Avenue was Octavio Cordovo, an immigrant from Mexico who had arrived illegally in the United States only a few months before the attack. He lived in Medford and worked sporadically in construction. Like so many other immigrants in Medford, every morning at dawn he stood at a corner near a 7-Eleven, waiting for someone in a truck to stop and offer him work for a day.

  On November 3, 2008, he had worked from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and had then gone home. Sometime later, at about 7:30 p.m., he had left the house to walk about four blocks to a CITGO gas station to buy coffee with a friend named Adrián. Two young men had approached them. He noticed that one was white and the other was black. Cordovo also noticed that other young people were milling around in the park next to the gas station and walking toward them as well. As he passed the two young men, the white one asked if they had any cigarettes.

  “We simply told them, ‘We don’t have any,’ ” Cordovo would later testify in court.

  What happened next was a blur. The young men pushed Adrián. One—Kuvan or Anthony—hit Cordovo on the shoulder and pushed him hard on the chest. Cordovo heard young girls yelling for the attackers to stop. “No, no, don’t do it!” they said. That’s the last thing he remembers. He was knocked down with a punch to the mouth, not unlike Lucero, and started bleeding, but luckily for him he passed out. Unlike Lucero, he didn’t have the chance to fight back.

  In his confession, José did not talk about the attack on Cordovo, but he corroborated his friends’ account of the attack on Loja and Lucero, and he added a new detail. Before Kuvan threw the first punch, “the shorter of the two Spanish guys said he didn’t want no trouble.” The shorter one was Lucero.

  José also told police that later, as he saw the cops pulling up next to them, he had taken a small white folding knife from his pocket and thrown it in a garbage can. He said that Jeff had given him the knife earlier that day, telling him he should have it in case he ever needed it.

  Nick confessed not only to the attack on Loja and Lucero but also to a different one that same day. On Saturday morning, he said, at around 5:00 a.m., along with Jordan and another young man also named Nick, they had come upon a Hispanic man and begun to insult him, hoping for a fight. The man had broken a glass bottle and gone at them. Nick, who carried a pellet pistol, had fired it at the ground three times and then driven off with the others. He had then thrown his pistol in the woods, thinking the loud noise and the commotion would attract cops. In fact, police stopped Jordan’s SUV near a bodega, but no one was arrested. Later, Nick had gone back to the woods to retrieve his pistol.

  Jordan gave the same version of the events as the others, and even corroborated Nick’s account of the earlier attack, adding that he too had fired his BB gun at the man with the broken bottle. Like Nick, he had thrown the gun into the woods by the train tracks. When the police came and questioned them, they lied and said they hadn’t done anything. The police took their names and told them to go home. Later, Jordan went back to the woods to get his BB gun. As he spoke to detectives that night, the gun was still in his car.

  Chris gave the shortest statement of all seven. His version of events matched that of the others in all but one point: he was the only one in the group who said he had never hunted “beaners” before.

  Six and a half hours after he left Jeff alone in the interview room, McLeer went back in and asked Jeff if he would be willing to draw a sketch of the events surrounding the stabbing. Jeff agreed and drew a childish and chilling portrait of the killing. He used two stick figures to indicate where the attack had started and where it had ended. The last stick figure has an explanatory note: “got stabbed by me.”

  After Jeff finished the drawing, McLeer asked him if he would allow them to videotape his statement, with a district attorney, not a detective, asking questions this time. Jeff agreed to that too, but then he seemed to have doubts and asked McLeer if he thought it was a good idea. McLeer understood Jeff was asking him for advice. It was the first time that night when Jeff had shown a degree of vulnerability. He seemed to be asking for the guidance of an adult. McLeer wouldn’t advise him, and so Jeff finally did what his father had so many times before drilled him to do: he asked McLeer if he could call his dad.

  On Sunday morning, Bob Conroy was worried. A couple of hours earlier, Matt Cleary had called to say that Jeff had not spent the night in his home, as he had been supposed to do. What do you mean he’s not there? Conroy had asked, a surge of panic seizing his body as he remembered that he had fallen asleep without having heard from Jeff. Well, where could he be? Cleary had no idea, and, what’s more, his sons had texted Jeff the night before and had not heard from him either.17

  Conroy called his wife, who had gone to church, and asked her if Jeff had called her. He had not. Conroy called three local hospitals and the police station, where, unknown to him, his son was still being interviewed. Whoever answered the phone told him that there was no one there by the name of Jeff Conroy. Worried, Conroy’s wife came home, and Conroy went outside to smoke a cigarette. That’s when the phone rang.

  We have Jeff in custody, Detective McLeer said. He’s charged with manslaughter.

  From the shock of hearing the news, Conroy fell and almost fainted. He was confused and angry and wasn’t even sure who was calling him or who had died. Conroy couldn’t comprehend that his son had been charged with killing a person. He placed his hand on his chest, near his heart, and willed himself to remain calm and coherent. Then he asked the detective to let him speak with his son.

  At Jeff’s request, a phone had been brought into the interrogation room, where the detectives remained, listening to the one-sided conversation.

  “Dad,” Jeff said.

  “Jeff,” Conroy said.

  Conroy pressed the speakerphone button so that his wife could listen in.18

  Jeff told his parents that he was under arrest and explained that he had stabbed a guy, that the man was dead, and that he was being charged with manslaughter.19 Later, Conroy would swear that his son never said he had stabbed a man. “A father would remember something like that,” he told me. Conroy advised Jeff to stop talking.

  Listen to me, Jeff. They are not your friends, Jeff. Keep your mouth shut.

  Jeff refused to allow the videotaping after that.

  Conroy hung up and called a lawyer. Then he drove to the police precinct and begged and pleaded to see Jeff. But the police wouldn’t let him, and Conroy, his chest hurting and his anger boiling, had to leave without his son.20

  It would take Jeff thirty-one hours to get out of the precinct, and when he did, he didn’t go home.

  CHAPTER 8

  A TORN COMMUNITY

  Mayor Paul Pontieri was reading the paper in his
backyard when he received the call at about 10:30 a.m. It was a fine Sunday morning. Yellow and red leaves from nearby maple trees fluttered in the breeze. The sun was peeking from behind the clouds, and the temperature hovered around fifty degrees. As had been his habit for the last thirty years, Pontieri had already gone to seven thirty Mass at St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic church on Ocean Avenue. Afterward, as was also his habit, he had bought some knot rolls, Italian bread, and coffee, and had visited his mother and one of his sisters, who lived nearby. They had coffee and a quick chat.1

  He went home after that, expecting to have a relaxing day. His children were grown, his wife, a busy woman who worked for the Southampton school district, always had things to do, and there was nothing on his mayoral agenda for that day. The elections were over—just five days earlier, 53 percent of the county had voted for Obama—and Pontieri himself had been easily reelected since he had run unopposed. All that awaited him this morning of November 9 was the paper and more coffee. Then the phone call changed the course of his day and, as he would soon find, the course of his mayoralty.

  There has been a death in the street, someone from the county executive’s office told him. The news startled Pontieri because there had been no murders in the village since he had been elected in 2004. He could recall one or perhaps two murders over the prior twenty-five years.2

  Pontieri hung up and set to work. Not having dealt with a murder before, he did what any citizen would do: he called the police. The dispatcher told him that there had been a fight and some kids had been arrested. That was all he knew. After the call, Pontieri tried to go back to the paper but couldn’t concentrate. Restless and unhappy with the scant information he had gathered, he drove to the police station, about five minutes from his house, and spoke with a detective, who gave him a very brief description of what had happened and told him he would know more once they were done with the investigation. Some of the young men involved had not yet been interviewed.