by Mirta Ojito
Quesada arrived in the United States legally with her family in 1970, when she was nine, and settled in Queens. Before leaving Ecuador the family had contemplated a choice of three states, California, Texas, or New York, and ultimately chose New York because they had family in New York City. Her father was a lawyer but didn’t have a license to practice in the United States, so he became a social worker for the city of New York. Her mother worked as a seamstress. Quesada married young, at twenty-one, and became a nurse, but in her late thirties she had a change of heart. She decided to become a police officer. Her decision was based both on practical and sentimental reasons. She thought she would make more money and have better benefits, and she also thought becoming a cop was the right thing to do, a way to give back.
There was something about the discipline and rigor of training for the police officer’s exam that appealed to her. “My father always said I was capable of doing anything I wanted,” she told me when we met at a coffee shop on Main Street in Patchogue in January 2012. “And he thought it [police officer] was the most honorable job in the world.” Quesada worked hard with a friend who trains athletes for the Special Olympics, and at forty became a police officer. When asked about her ambitions in one of her tests at the police academy, she wrote that some day she wanted to be an inspector, a rank just below chief in the police nomenclature.
For six years, she had worked as a cop, patrolling the streets of her precinct. Then Lucero was killed, and the shock of his death jolted Quesada out of her routine. She felt she had to do something radical. She read in the newspaper that Levy, the county executive, was looking for a liaison to the Hispanic community. She had experience and credibility in her community, where, she said, “she had her ear to the ground.” Quesada wanted that job. “I needed to be part of the change,” she told me.
Still distraught over Lucero’s death, she went to visit her mother who had moved back to Ecuador. She was with her when the inspector called with the news she had been waiting to hear: the job was hers.
Julio Espinoza heard about the murder at home, before he went to work that Sunday. Someone called to tell him, and Espinoza immediately recalled the quiet man who often came to his shop to buy a telephone card to call his mother in Ecuador. Espinoza got in touch with some friends and customers, and little by little started piecing together the story. By Sunday evening, it was clear that Lucero had been killed because he was Hispanic. What gave him away? Espinoza wondered. Was it the shade of brown of his skin? His accent? Had he even spoken to his attackers? Was it the way he walked: head down and hands deep in his pockets to avoid unwanted stares?8
Espinoza was in despair. He had two children in the same high school where, he had heard, the attackers were students. What if his children became a target too? How could he protect them from people who pounced without provocation? His children had told him for years that the school was divided, with Hispanics often being the subject of taunts and even harassment. But he never thought it would come to violence, much less a murder. For the first time since leaving Ecuador he questioned whether leaving home and building a life in a town so far from everything familiar to him had been such a good idea.
For now, the only thing to do was to go pay his respects to Marcelo Lucero. Since no funeral or religious services had been announced yet, Espinoza drove straight to the morgue. But he couldn’t get in, and the last thing he wanted now was to attract attention to himself. Espinoza drove home—carefully.
By Monday morning everyone knew what had happened, even those who had been out of town, like Jean Kaleda, the librarian. She was on the deck of the New London ferry, coming back from a trip to Cape Cod with a group of friends, and enjoying the last hours of a relaxing long weekend when she heard about it.9
Her friend Sally Rein, a forty-year resident of Patchogue, had received a call from her husband who told her that an Ecuadorian man had been killed by a group of teenagers. It was all over the news. Ashen, Rein relayed the news to Kaleda. Did you know a Marcelo Lucero? Rein asked Kaleda, who suddenly felt sick. This is it, she thought. This must be connected to what the English learners at the library had told her just a few days before. Her stomach lurched at the thought that it had come to this. She was stunned at the audacity of teenagers harassing a grown man simply because he was Latino, and horrified that the harassment had resulted in murder.
The rest of the trip home, Kaleda stayed on the deck, thinking long and hard about what had transpired and how it connected to her fears about the world in general and her sense that humankind never really learned from past mistakes. She also wondered if any of the friends she had made in Patchogue from Gualaceo knew Marcelo Lucero or maybe even were related to him. And she asked herself, though she knew the answer, whether she could have done anything to prevent his death.
As Kaleda was returning home, Gilda Ramos, the Spanish-speaking librarian who had been so instrumental in reaching out to the community, was arriving at work. In the morning, she had watched the news and heard about the killing. In her car, she learned more about the story on the radio. Now she had the victim’s name and a possible motive for the murder: hatred. When she got to the library everyone wanted to know what she, as a Hispanic herself, thought. Ramos gave everyone the same answer: unbelievable.10
She looked for Kaleda but then remembered she was on vacation. She called Kaleda at home and on her cell phone anyway. Just leaving the message made her feel she was accomplishing something. She thought, with sadness, that steps should have been taken earlier to prevent this murder. Her students had told her about the harassment, and what had she done? Nothing other than tell her supervisor, who, she knew, had told the mayor. A meeting had been scheduled, she knew, but now it was too late. Why hadn’t anybody done anything about it? Why did it have to get this far? Now there was a dead man, and the whole country, if not the world, was looking at Patchogue as a place of hatred and intolerance.
Ramos was deep in thought when she saw the mayor approach. Pontieri was upset and worried and wanted to know what to do. What now? Ramos didn’t know, but she told him she would help in any way she could to alleviate fears among Hispanics and to calm everyone else. The scheduled meeting with the community would have to take place, they agreed, but a week later, the following Wednesday, November 19. That would give them enough time to get through the difficult days immediately after the murder and to pay their respect to the Lucero family. By the way, did anybody know what was happening to the body? Was there a funeral, a Mass, anything planned?
No one knew. It was a tense and confusing Monday.
The next day, county executive Steve Levy called the murder “a one-day story” and added that the killing had received undue attention because he had been very vocal about his views on immigration. The implication was that Lucero’s had been a routine death, if any violent death can be called routine.11 Two days later Levy retracted his words. He wrote a letter to Newsday, the local daily, in which he said he had made a mistake. “The horrible incident is indeed more than a one-day story,” he wrote.12 He was right.
On November 12, Wednesday, Mayor Pontieri, accompanied by his wife, went to Gilda Ramos’s evening class for English learners. With Ramos translating his words, he told the students that he was very worried about what had happened and that he would do what he could so that they would never again be afraid to walk the streets of Patchogue. Pontieri hoped that the fifteen students there would begin to spread the word that he cared and that Patchogue was safe.13
Earlier that day, Reverend Wolter was invited to speak at a community event in front of the middle school his son Casey attended. Several civic leaders and elected officials were invited as well, and some were very angry. Levy was not there. Eddington was, and he urged everyone to work together. He conceded that a “terrible incident” had taken place in their midst, but, he said, “Let it not define our county, our community and our town.” He also appealed to the state to be “proactive” and not “reactive” by funding tolerance-foc
used educational programs in schools and additional social workers. Several others spoke, including Luis Valenzuela, a respected civic leader who was the executive director of the Long Island Immigrant Alliance.14
“This is indeed a tragic, tragic event. It is something that wounds the community. It wounds our humanity and yet we need to be mindful that there have been circumstances that promote a climate of intolerance here in Suffolk County,” he said in a somber tone. Gathering steam as he went on, he issued a challenge that sounded more like a threat: “We challenge the legislators in this community not to ever introduce another anti-Latino bill.”
Eddington, his hands folded in front of him and staring straight ahead, didn’t seem to react to Valenzuela’s words, as if he had not been one of the legislators who had introduced bills perceived as anti-Latino. There was loud applause, and voices from the audience asked, “Where is he?” Everyone knew that Valenzuela was referring to Levy. “Where is Levy?” voices went on. “He didn’t show up!” someone yelled.
Valenzuela let the moment pass and went on to explain why the death of Marcelo Lucero had not been a surprise. “Fourteen months ago, right in this community, we had a demonstration, and the theme was hate speech equals hate crime,” he reminded everyone, and he ended his talk with the most poignant of all battle cries: “Never again!”
Wolter knew that the angry tone of the rally was justified, but he thought that something more than anger was needed. He looked around and noticed that the majority of those present were Latinos. When his turn to speak came, he tried to change the tone from that of merely criticism and blame to empowerment and cooperation. He urged everyone to follow him in a four-word chant, “How can I help?” One way to help, he said, was to donate money to the Lucero family for the return of the body to Ecuador, which is what his family had requested. He had already begun calling civic organizations and asking them to make financial contributions to defray funeral and family expenses, which he knew would occur.15
“If you don’t have the money right now, I’ll wait two or three minutes,” he said, and some on the stage and the audience chuckled.
Other community leaders addressed the crowd as well, but no one captured Wolter’s attention like a young man who suddenly leaped on the stage and grabbed the microphone. He was wearing a blindingly white T-shirt, a dark denim jacket, large sunglasses that hid his eyes, and a checkered cap worn low over his forehead, but Wolter recognized him as the same man he had seen in the group of Latinos standing near Lucero’s home. As Wolter would soon learn, he had been right in assuming then that the young man knew Lucero. He was Lucero’s younger brother, Joselo.
When Joselo took the stage, everyone listened. He had a quiet dignity about him, the kind that comes from searing pain and from knowing one has been wronged.
“I’m going to take these glasses off so you can see an immigrant,” Joselo said, and Wolter was riveted.16
For about five minutes, he talked about his color, his features—the immigrant in him—but he also talked about his loneliness and his pain. He said he had received so much support that he felt “among family.” He described his brother as a hard-working man who was trying to make a living while helping the family he had left behind. “We are simple people,” he said, and he pleaded with the audience to help to stop hate and to “try to live together.”
About the young men who had attacked his brother, he said, “I don’t hate them, but I want justice.”
His message resonated with Wolter, who feared that the killing of Lucero would divide the community even further. In Joselo he recognized not only a young man in pain but also a potential leader, someone who could use the death of his brother to try to build bridges. Wolter had been following the news on television since Sunday, and invariably he saw white or brown faces talking about the crime, but he didn’t see any mingling. He didn’t see anyone crossing the aisle and standing with the other. Wolter thought he could be the white face among the brown faces.
When Joselo got off the stage, Wolter followed.
Joselo had not wanted to come to the United States. His mother had made that choice for him. She told him he was leaving four days before he was scheduled to leave. Joselo was in shock when he heard, fearing his “one-way ticket” would forever separate him from everything he knew, from his country and his family.17
In time he came to understand his mother’s reasons. Shortly before he left, he had been kicked out of school for bad behavior, and he had been restless at home, hanging out with a group of fourteen friends. But, one by one, his friends had started to make their way to the United States. At the same time, Doña Rosario was worried that her son would get in trouble, or, worse, that he would be recruited to fight in a skirmish between Peru and Ecuador over border territories, which began in November of 1994, escalated into war in January of 1995, and ended a month later. The conflict, known as the Cenepa War, left a bloody trail: about five hundred soldiers dead from both sides.18
By then Joselo was gone. He arrived in Patchogue two years after his brother.
“In some ways she want to make me a better person,” he told a documentarian shortly after his brother’s death. “She want to, you know, help me grow up, you know. Cuz we don’t have many hopes. We don’t have many opportunities in my country. So I don’t go to school. It was really a hard decision for her. Either way, she can keep me there and send me to the war or send me here.”
At the beginning, living on Long Island was “like a nightmare,” he said. His brother, whom he had seen as a father figure since the death of their father when Joselo was six, was working all the time. His friends, who were so excited to see him at first, were busy as well. Everyone worked, went to school, or had responsibilities. Everything was far. Joselo couldn’t just walk outside and meet friends, as he used to do at home. All of a sudden he was alone in a place where he did not know the language. He was nineteen.
“I just see in the mirror myself,” he said. “And I was like, uh, I don’t know what to do.”
He cried often. “Mom, this is not for me,” he sobbed on the phone with his mother more than once. Not only did he miss his family but he also missed a young woman he had fallen in love with and had hoped to marry. For the first two weeks, he would dream about Gualaceo every night. He would wake up in the morning and wonder, “Where am I?” Slowly he came to understand that there was no way back, and that he needed to find work and grow up. After a year sharing a place with his brother, he moved out and began living on his own.
Still, Joselo saw his brother as his protector and guide. The two talked all the time and saw each other often. The Friday before Lucero was killed, they had talked for about forty-five minutes. They had gone out to dinner and then parked by the train station and continued talking. As he was getting ready to leave, Joselo, who sometimes called his brother “Loquito,” as in little crazy one, said, “I’ll see you tomorrow or later.”
“Okay,” Lucero replied.
Then, when Joselo was walking off toward his own car, Lucero surprised him with a shout: “Loquito! Take care of yourself.”
That was the last thing Joselo heard his brother say. The next day, Lucero went to work and Joselo went out with friends. They didn’t see each other or talk all day, which was not unusual.
On Sunday morning, Joselo was still in bed when he heard pounding on the front door. He jumped from the bed and looked out the bedroom window. There was a car outside, so Joselo went to the door to see who it was.
It was a detective, showing him his badge. Joselo was surprised because he had never been in trouble with the police in Patchogue. “Are you Joselo?” the detective asked. Joselo said, “No, I’m not Joselo.” He had a weird feeling. He was scared and thought that whatever they wanted to tell him, he didn’t want to hear, so he decided to lie. But the detective pressed on. “This is something really serious. Do you know Marcelo or do you have any relationship with Marcelo Lucero?” The mention of his brother’s name made Joselo focus. “Yes,
of course. He’s my brother,” he replied.
The detective then asked to come in. They needed to talk. He asked Joselo to sit down. At that moment, a cousin called Joselo and asked him if he was all right. Joselo had no idea why his cousin was calling, but thought it was related to the detective’s visit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’ll call you back.” He hung up and expectantly turned to the detective.
“What I’m going to tell you is something really hard and I want you to take it in the calmest way possible,” the detective said. “Your brother was murdered last night. Seven kids attacked him and stabbed him.”
At that moment, Joselo would recall later, he did not believe the detective. “I simply said, ‘No, this is not right. It’s not true.’ ” He picked up his phone and called his brother’s cell phone number, but of course no one answered. He called a second time. No answer. Then the detective said, “He’s not going to answer. We have his cell phone.”
“That was the worst moment of my life,” Joselo said.
When he got off the stage, Joselo walked south on South Ocean Avenue. A group of Latinos were huddled on the corner waiting for him, but Wolter was not deterred. He felt as if God was taking him in that direction. Like a leaf in the wind, he let himself be guided. Out of habit, he reached in and pulled out his business card. Oh, great, he thought to himself. Another white guy with a business card. He put it away and approached the men, who seemed to have built a protective layer around Joselo. Wolter asked for their permission to speak, and to his surprise his first words to Joselo were, Where is your brother’s body? Until that moment, he hadn’t known what he was going to say or what his role in this tragedy would be.