Hunting Season

by Mirta Ojito

  Contradicting Loja’s testimony, Dawson appeared to say that Lucero had not been beaten repeatedly. Other than the wound that killed him, his only other injury came from Kevin Shea’s admitted punch to the mouth. Lucero’s autopsy also revealed that he had low levels of cocaine and marijuana in his body and enough alcohol to be “right at the levels of intoxication or just short of it.”28

  Nicholas Hausch, the only one of the group to appear as a witness for the prosecution, painted a desolate picture of “beaner hopping.” This is how he described it: “It’s when you go out and you look for a Hispanic to beat up.” In a packed courtroom, Nick admitted that before the attack on Lucero, he and two friends had gone “beaner hopping” as well. They had punched and kicked a Hispanic man who was riding a bicycle. Nick said he took the man’s white baseball cap “as a trophy.”29

  Nick also made a comment that was a setback for the prosecution. After the stabbing of Lucero, he said, he had heard someone say, “Imagine if I get away with this,” the comment that O’Donnell had attributed to Jeff. However, Nick said, it was not Jeff who uttered that remark. He didn’t know who had said it.30

  The most dramatic and unexpected moment of the trial came during its fourth week when Jeff took the stand in his own defense. It was an unusual and risky move. His lawyer later told reporters that in his twenty-five years as a defense lawyer, he had put his clients on the stand fewer than ten times.31 The tactic can change the outcome of a trial. If the defendant is likable and believable, it can sway jurors to a not-guilty verdict, but if jurors don’t believe the defendant, the results can be disastrous for the defense.

  So when Jeff took the stand, his fate was in his hands. All the preparation and pretrial hearings and motions and posturing came down to the recollections and personality of a nineteen-year-old performing under the most stressful circumstance of his life.

  He wore a white, open-collared shirt without a tie as he sat on the witness stand.32 His testimony began simply enough, with answers to his lawyer’s questions about his life, his age, whom he lived with, and what sports he played. Then the lawyer started asking him about the night of November 8, 2008, from his visit to Alyssa Sprague’s home to the moment when the fight with Lucero was over and, he said, Chris Overton approached him.

  “And what did he say to you?” Keahon asked.

  “He said, ‘Jeff, I think I just stabbed the guy in the shoulder. I really cannot get in trouble with this. Can you please take the knife? I only nicked him and I promise you he’s not hurt.’ And then, after that, I’m like, ‘Why can’t you get in trouble for this?’ He says, ‘Because I already told you that I was involved in a murder case last year and I still haven’t gotten sentenced and I’ll be screwed if I get caught. So can you please take the knife?’ And then he’s like, ‘Look back. He’s even walking away.’ I looked back and the guy was walking away.”

  “Did you take the knife?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do with the knife?”

  “I was holding it.”

  “Did you see Nicky Hausch?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “He said, ‘What happened?’ ”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I told him—I’m like, ‘I stabbed the guy.’ ”

  Just like that, composed and unsmiling, staring straight ahead, Jeff transferred the blame to Chris, a kid he had met the night of the killing.

  When her time came, O’Donnell sounded incredulous as she asked Jeff how he could possibly take the blame for killing Lucero to protect someone he had just met.33

  “I felt bad for him,” he answered.

  Jeff also told her he had gone along with his friends that night because he had needed a ride for a sleepover, not because he had any intention of going “beaner-hopping.” He had never touched Lucero, whom he described as the aggressor in the confrontation, wielding his belt as a weapon against the teenagers. Lucero “could have walked away,” he said. As to his confession the night of the murder, he admitted that he had told detectives that he had stabbed Lucero. However, he explained, the detectives also wrote down things that he had never said, particularly his admission that he was part of a group that hunted down Latinos for a fight.34

  As Jeff’s testimony dragged on for about three and a half hours, one could hear groans and guffaws from the packed courtroom.35 “Can you believe this kid?” someone muttered loud enough to be heard by some of the hundred people that crowded the gallery,36 among them Lucero’s mother and sister, who had flown in from Ecuador and attended the trial for the first time that day, and his brother, who was present almost every day. Doña Rosario sat as she always did, stone-faced, inscrutable in her pain. In her left hand she held a tissue, with which she dabbed at the corner of her eyes. The Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota, made a rare appearance. As always when he attended, he sat in the first row. A few rows behind him sat Denise Overton.

  Asked afterward how she had felt when she heard the accusations against Chris, Overton told reporters, “It was horrible, absolutely horrible.”37 She said that Jeff had “no conscience whatsoever.”38 It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to blame her son for a crime.

  Chris was the only one among the seven young men who attacked Lucero to have been implicated in a murder before. Jeff’s defense was not a novel one.

  On May 8, 2007, exactly eighteen months before Lucero was killed, Christopher Overton had joined four other teenagers to burglarize a house in East Patchogue owned by Carlton Shaw, a thirty-eight-year-old Jamaican immigrant who worked three jobs to support his family. When Shaw confronted the burglars, one of them shot and killed him. His three-year-old boy, unharmed, was later found asleep on his chest.

  Terraine Slide, then sixteen, was charged with second-degree murder. Slide’s cousin, Levon Griffin, pleaded guilty to the same charge. The other three, including Chris, were fourteen and fifteen at the time. They pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and pointed to Slide as the killer.39 During his murder trial, Slide’s lawyer argued that the young man had been coerced into confessing guilt for a murder he did not commit. Slide, who was the only one of the defendants to be tried as an adult, blamed Chris for firing the shot that killed Shaw.40 The jurors did not believe Slide and found him guilty. However, the conviction was reversed by a state appellate court and prosecutors decided to retry him. In May 2011, Slide pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter instead of going to trial a second time. During questioning in court, Slide still maintained that Chris had brought the .22-caliber revolver used to kill Shaw.41 But this time he admitted to having fired the shot himself.42

  On September 6, 2011, Justice Doyle, who had presided over Slide’s case, sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison.43

  The jurors did not believe Jeff either.

  On April 19, 2010, after four days of deliberation, at 11:22 a.m., the jurors read their verdict: Jeff was acquitted of the most serious charge—second-degree murder—but he was found guilty of manslaughter as a hate crime and of gang assault in the attack on Lucero, as well as attempted assault on three other Hispanic men. The verdict meant that the jurors did not think that Jeff had intended to kill Lucero, only to cause him serious physical injury.44

  Jeff heard the verdict while standing next to his lawyer.45 Keahon placed a hand on his back and felt him begin to tremble.46 When the jurors were excused, and Jeff finally sat, he bowed his head. As he was about to be handcuffed and led away by court officers, Conroy turned to face his parents and seemed to give them an encouraging look.47 His parents had sat quietly in the courtroom, but when they walked outside, Conroy began to cry, covering his face with one hand while his wife, who had attended the trial sporadically and had testified for about ten minutes on her son’s behalf, remained stone-faced.48

  Lucero’s family arrived in court after the verdict was read, but in time
for Joselo to praise the district attorney’s office, saying that their work had restored his faith in the American justice system.

  Steve Levy, who had switched to the Republican Party to run for governor, called the attack on Lucero “a heinous, reprehensible act.” In a statement released right after the verdict, he seemed to urge the judge to deliver a tough sentence. “It is my hope that the sentence will properly reflect the brutal and blind hatred that was displayed on the night of the murder,” the statement read.49

  Not everyone was content with the verdict. Allan Ramírez, the Long Island pastor who hovered protectively around the Lucero family, said that a manslaughter conviction meant “our lives are not worth very much.”50

  The cameras trailed the Lucero family as they drove away from the courthouse and toward Funaro Court in Patchogue, where Lucero’s blood had once left a 370-foot-long twisting path.51

  Someone had placed yellow and red tulips on the spot where Lucero bled to death. Children’s toys, including a blue plastic pool, were scattered on the pavement, along with a flattened Arizona Iced Tea can, several fans, an old computer, broken lamps, and an air-conditioning unit. Scraggly plants clung to life against a rusted metal fence. Twelve television cameras captured the scene as the family received hugs and kisses from friends and well-wishers.

  In front of them all, on the sidewalk, stood Doña Rosario, who spoke of forgiveness, and her son, Joselo, who once again turned to the cameras to plead his case.

  “This is the place where my brother broke the rules,” he said, referring to the often-mentioned fact that Lucero had fought back. “He defended himself. He wanted to be treated like a human.”

  About Patchogue and hate crimes, Joselo appeared to have mixed but prescient feelings. At the courthouse he told reporters, “The hunting season is over, at least for now.” But later, after praying softly at the site where his brother had been killed, he seemed to reconsider. Hate, he said, “is always looking for another place.”52

  EPILOGUE

  The hunting season wasn’t over. As Joselo Lucero had predicted, hatred simply moved elsewhere. On December 18, 2009, thirteen months after Lucero was killed, the New York Times quoted Thomas E. Perez, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, as saying that the department had dealt with more federal hate crime cases that year than in any other year since 2001. Twenty-five hate crime cases were filed in 2009, two more than in the year before. The higher number was not necessarily a reflection of an increase in crime. Rather, it was a change in prosecutorial attitude. After a downtick in prosecutions of hate crimes during the George W. Bush administration, Perez pronounced the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice “open for business.”1

  In 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics issued a report about citizen-reported hate crimes for the years 2003–2009. Almost ninety of the crimes in that period were “perceived to be motivated by racial or ethnic prejudice or both,” and 87 percent of the crimes involved violence. In 2009 alone, “an estimated 148,400 hate crimes were reported to the National Crime Victimization Survey,” including eight homicides. Yet only about 45 percent of the total number of crimes were reported to the police; 19 percent of those who didn’t call the police explained that they had decided to remain quiet because the police “could not or would not do anything to help.”2

  Shortly after Lucero was killed, the Associated Press reported that there had been a surge in hate crimes since the election of Barack Obama as president.3 If so, Lucero may have been the first victim of that surge, a mere four days after the election. However, there is no indication that Obama’s election had anything to do with the attack on Lucero and Loja. They were hunted because they were vulnerable, and because the teenagers who attacked them must have felt that all Hispanics they encountered in Patchogue and Medford were Mexicans, and therefore illegally in the country. Their perceived immigration status rendered them somehow lesser human beings in the eyes of the teenagers.

  Upon hearing about the case, many have expressed surprise that one of the teenagers—José Pacheco—was black and Hispanic, not only because he was a friend of Jeffrey Conroy and the other white young men in the group, but because he too had participated in repeated attacks against immigrants. How, I’ve been asked repeatedly, could he turn against his own people? Those who study the nature of bias know that one can be both an ethnic or a racial minority and a bigot. “This duality is common,” wrote Touré, the author of Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, in a Time magazine column. “We give humanity to those we know, but the true test is, Can we extend it to those we don’t?”4

  Only three of the teenagers spoke to reporters after their arrest: Jeffrey Conroy, José Pacheco, and, briefly, Nicholas Hausch.

  Jeff was said to be “reflective,” “apologetic,” “humble,” and “hopeful” when he spoke to New York Times reporter Manny Fernandez as he awaited sentencing in a Suffolk County jail in Riverhead. During the hour-long interview he spoke “of his love and concern for his family,” and of the future he still hoped to have with Pamela Suárez, his on-and-off girlfriend since middle school.5

  “I’m nothing like what the papers said about me,” he said. “I’m not a white supremacist or anything like that. I’m not this serious racist kid everyone thinks I am.”

  He told an anecdote unheard until then: when he was in his junior year of high school, in October 2007, he had confronted two white men outside a convenience store who were about to steal the bicycle of a Hispanic man, possibly a day laborer. As for the swastika tattooed on his thigh, he said, “It doesn’t mean anything to me at all.”

  From behind a Plexiglas partition and wearing prison greens a year after the attack, José told Sumathi Reddy, a Newsday reporter, that he had “nothing to do with this crime,” claiming that he had been in the car that night with the other six teenagers because he had needed a ride home.6 Because of his involvement in the case, he had been threatened by Latino gangs in jail; some inmates had spit on him. He said that he spent his days reading books his mother brought him and trying to learn Japanese. He played basketball, went to a prayer group, and called his mother every day.

  “I’m innocent,” he said. “I want the public to know I’m a good person. I’m not a monster.”

  Nick, in a brief interview with Newsday’s Andrew Strickler when he was out on bail, said that if he could do it over again, he “wouldn’t go out” the night of the attack.7

  Kevin has not spoken to reporters, but his father, responding to my inquiry for an interview, sent me a letter in March 2012 in which he said that his son would like to meet with me. “He would like you to see how he has matured and grown from his mistakes,” Thomas Shea Sr. wrote. “I must let you know that I love my son and try to see him as often as possible,” he went on. “What happened, how it happened, and what led up to this tragedy is impossible for us to answer, but we would like to show that this was not in character for Kevin.”8

  Though I followed up with both, I never heard back from them.

  After the attackers were sent to prison—Jordan Dasch, José Pacheco, and Anthony Hartford each got seven years, while Christopher Overton got six, Kevin Shea got eight, and Nicholas Hausch got five—the Lucero family filed two separate lawsuits, one against the teenagers and their parents and another against the county, the village, and the police. The latter was dismissed on a technicality and is now on appeal, but the suit against the families is pending in Suffolk County Supreme Court. In it, the estate of Marcelo Lucero accuses the parents of the teenagers of inadequate supervision of their children’s “dangerous and defective condition,” which is described in the document as “a propensity toward vicious, violent, anti-social, criminal and assaultive conduct.”9

  On November 6, 2012, four years after Lucero’s death, President Obama was reelected with overwhelming support from Hispanics, who punished Republicans for, among other things, their fury at undocumented immigrants and their reluctance to contemplate any kind of legislation a
imed at legalizing them. Though not all of the estimated 11.1 million undocumented in the country are Hispanics, the majority of them, at 59 percent, are Mexicans, who live all over the country but tend to concentrate in Nevada, California, and Texas. In 2010, they represented 5.2 percent of the US workforce.10

  Merely five months before the election, in a move that was widely interpreted by political pundits and analysts to be part of a strategy to win the Latino vote, President Obama issued a presidential order deferring the deportation of young undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the country illegally as children. The tactic worked. Latinos went to polls in droves—11.2 million Latinos voted—helping win Obama four more years in the White House.11 Immediately after, the president promised to make immigration reform a priority.

  In a piece that began with this sentence, “The sleeping giant has awoken,” CNN reported that Latinos, who made up 10 percent of the electorate for the first time ever, had helped Obama win the election in key states such as New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, and Virginia. “Latinos, the fastest growing minority, making up 16% of the nation’s population, made their mark on election night as they voted for President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney 71% to 27%, a lower percentage than Republican candidates have received in the last three elections.”12

  On November 8, 2012, the Wall Street Journal ran a postelection editorial with a headline in Spanish: “¡Estimados Republicanos!” The “Dear Republicans” headline—the first I’ve ever seen in Spanish atop an editorial in that newspaper—was attention-grabbing; the content of the editorial was even more provocative. The conservative, pro-business newspaper chastised Republicans for the “antagonistic attitude that the GOP too often exhibits toward America’s fastest-growing demographic group.” It called the antagonism “unnecessary,” because immigrants—documented or not—are a “natural GOP constituency,” with their belief in hard work and their conservative culture.13