Hunting Season (18 page)

The ambulance got to Lucero at 12:12 a.m., two minutes before Schiera did.

There were several police cars near the entrance to Funaro Court, a street that to Schiera initially seemed like the driveway of the white, two-story house he saw there. The lights from the cars had attracted some people, who milled around competing for a chance to see the bleeding man on the ground.

Mara and Salerno were already attending to Lucero, whose name they did not yet know. They took his vital signs: his respiratory rate was 28 and labored—a normal rate wouldn’t be above 16 or 20, at the most; his pulse rate was 46—a normal one is 60–100 beats a minute; and his level of consciousness was rated as reacting only to pain. EMTs rate four levels of consciousness: “alert,” which means that the patient is alert and talking; “voice” or “verbal,” which means that the patient is confused but talking; “pain,” which means that the patient does not respond except to some form of tactile stimulation, such as being moved, or to having a flashlight shone in his or her eyes; and “unresponsive,” which means just that. Lucero was one level away from being unresponsive.

Mara and Salerno got a long backboard to stabilize Lucero, holding his head in such a way to keep it in line with his spine. But Schiera thought the board wasn’t necessary. The man lying
on the ground before him had gone into shock. He was very pale, he was sweating profusely, and his breathing was short, rapid, and labored. He was not speaking and his eyes were closed. Shock is often described as the transition between life and death. He was bleeding from the wound in his chest, and half his body was still under the parked SUV where Loja had left him.

Schiera noticed bloody gauze on the ground and took a closer look at Lucero’s chest. He asked one of the crew members to grab the oxygen tank and a mask and apply it to the victim. Vital signs were taken again, three minutes after the first check. Lucero’s respiratory rate was not recorded because at that point he had an oxygen mask on; his pulse had lowered even more, to 40 beats per minute; and now his level of consciousness had dropped to “unresponsive.”

Lucero’s breathing was so labored that the oxygen mask didn’t help him. Schiera asked for a device known as an Asherman chest seal, a dressing used when a punctured lung is suspected. He had no idea how deep Lucero’s injury was or what had caused it but he assumed the worst and reasoned that the chest seal would help him by allowing air to escape from the chest while stopping the bleeding. But then, as they attempted to move Lucero, he began to bleed again, more profusely this time, and the seal washed right off his chest. They put Lucero back down and inserted a plastic device in his mouth to keep the airways clear. They also applied another oxygen mask and a bulky dressing to stanch the bleeding. At 12:25 a.m., thirteen minutes after the ambulance had arrived but twenty-nine minutes after Fernández had called 911, Lucero was finally placed in the ambulance and driven away from Funaro Court, leaving behind a trail of blood.

Six or seven police cruisers convened at the area known as Four Corners in the Village of Patchogue, the intersection of Ocean Avenue and Main Street. Seven teenagers had their hands up,
their hearts in their throats, and their bodies pressed against the glass windows of a real estate office.

A cop named Richardsen began to frisk the teenagers for weapons. When he got to Jeff, he patted him once and didn’t feel anything, but then Jeff said, “Can I speak to you in private?”

The officer pulled him aside. “I got the knife on me,” Jeff said.

“Where?”

“In the waistband.”

Richardsen lifted up Jeff’s sweatshirt, found the knife, and opened the blade.

“There’s blood on it,” he said.

To which Jeff replied, “I stabbed the guy.”
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Just then, Loja arrived on the scene in a police car. His attackers were lined up against the wall. Loja could see them all clearly, except for the one he knew to be black, José Pacheco, though he didn’t know his name. He told the police that one was missing, the dark-skinned one, and they brought him forth so Loja could take a good look. They shone a flashlight on José’s face. That’s him, Loja said, and stayed put, legs shaking, looking at the group for a few more minutes. He watched as the police took them away. Then he too was driven to the Fifth Police Precinct.

The emergency crew wanted to take Lucero to a helicopter landing zone at Briarcliffe College, a few blocks away from Funaro Court. The crew thought that his condition was critical and that he needed to be airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital about fourteen miles to the north. As a level-one trauma center, the hospital has a trauma team that includes a surgeon, nurses, anesthesiologists, and aides on standby twenty-four hours a day, seven day a week. The team can perform surgery right in the emergency room, without losing precious moments moving a broken body to another area. Brookhaven Hospital, which is the closest hospital to Patchogue, not even five minutes away, has
doctors on call who are trained to handle trauma, but they can’t perform surgery in the emergency room—it is not a level-one trauma center.
¹⁰

At 12:28 a.m., the ambulance arrived at the college, ready to transfer Lucero to the helicopter, which hadn’t yet arrived. At that very moment, the crew noticed that Lucero’s heart had stopped beating. An air ambulance is not supposed to transport patients who’ve gone into cardiac arrest. The crew decided to take him to Brookhaven Hospital after all. On the way there, they began administering CPR, compressing his chest and trying to help Lucero breathe with an oxygen mask. They also used an external defibrillator. Police cars blocked off intersections and stopped traffic for them, but they had to make one more stop to pick up a medic from the Holbrook Fire Department. The medic had been called because, unlike the others in the ambulance, he was trained and certified at a more advanced level.

Brookhaven Hospital was so close that all the medic had time to do was to check the electrical output of Lucero’s heart with an EKG machine. The situation was dire. They arrived at the hospital at 12:34 a.m. As Schiera was pulling the patient from the back of the ambulance, he took a look at the EKG monitor. It showed a heart rhythm known as “pulseless electrical activity”—a medical term for a heart in its final stages of life, producing electricity that resembles a heartbeat but it is not.

Medical personnel, who had already been alerted to the severity of Lucero’s condition, met them at the door. But it was too late. Lucero was pronounced dead at 1:09 a.m. on November 9, about an hour and a half after he was stabbed. The medical examiner would later confirm the obvious: the cause of death was a four-inch-deep stab wound to the chest.
¹¹

“Is this going to be a problem for the wrestling season?” Jeffrey Conroy asked homicide detective John A. McLeer of the Suffolk County Police Department. It was about 3:30 a.m. Five minutes
earlier, McLeer, accompanied by another detective, James Faughnan, had gone into the room where Jeff sat handcuffed. He was wearing blue jeans, a black, gray, and gold Patchogue-Medford Raiders basketball sweatshirt with white piping, and black sneakers. At some point, McLeer would have to ask Jeff to take off his clothes. They would become evidence.
¹²

McLeer introduced himself and took off Jeff’s handcuffs, which were connected to a chain that was attached to the desk. McLeer and Faughnan had the task of finding out what had transpired at Funaro Court. But first they needed to respond to Jeff’s question.

“Jeff, we’re from the homicide squad. Forget about wrestling. It’s the least of your problems right now. That’s the least of your concerns,” McLeer said.

And just like that, Jeff’s transformation from star athlete to murder suspect began.

The interview room in the Fifth Precinct detective area was small and square, just over nine feet by nine feet. The concrete block walls were painted off-white. The floor was tiled and sparsely furnished—just a desk and chairs. From the one window in the room, blocked by bars, one could see the outside. A solid wooden door separated interviewers and interviewees from the rest of the precinct. A desk, old and chipped, was against the wall with the window. Faughnan sat at one end, opposite Jeff. McLeer sat in the middle. They asked Jeff some basic information—name, date of birth, address, phone number—and then read him the Miranda rights.
¹³

After each sentence, Jeff wrote his initials, indicating he had understood his rights: “You have the right to remain silent.” (He didn’t remain silent.) “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” (Everything he said was used against him—immediately and also in court.) “You have the right to talk with a lawyer right now and have him present while you are being questioned.” (Jeff did not call a lawyer; he didn’t even ask to call
his parents.) “If you cannot afford a lawyer and want one, a lawyer will be appointed for you by the court before any questioning. If you decide to answer questions now without a lawyer present, you will have the right to stop the questioning at any time until you talk to a lawyer.” (Jeff talked for hours, not stopping until his father—whom he eventually called—told him to.)
¹⁴

With the legal stuff out of the way, Detective McLeer asked him how he had ended up at the Fifth Precinct.

“I already told the big cop what I did, and he’s got my knife,” Jeff said. The “big cop” was Michael Richardsen, who had already turned in the knife, now tucked away in McLeer’s gun locker.

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.