Hunting Season (29 page)

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 aimed 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

The month after the election, national Latino leaders, emboldened by their show of power on Election Day, said they would “keep a report card” on the immigration debate expected to take place in 2013 so they could mobilize Hispanic voters against those who do not support “comprehensive immigration reform,” a code phrase for legislation that would allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the country legally and on a path to citizenship.
¹⁴

On April 17, a bipartisan group of eight senators introduced
a sweeping immigration bill that President Obama characterized as “largely consistent” with his principles but that drew the ire of opponents who began to publicly discuss strategies to kill the bill. At issue is the fear among conservatives that a clear path to citizenship would encourage even more illegal immigration. The bill passed the Senate in late June. As of this writing, it is unclear if the House will pass a similar bill.
¹⁵

Last year, one of my children wrote a letter to Vice President Joe Biden as part of a class project. Biden replied, or signed the letter that someone else wrote for him, addressing my son’s question about undocumented immigrants but emphasizing the illegality of their status and placing the burden of solving their problems on the immigrants themselves.

“This Administration is working to protect our borders at points of entry with additional personnel, infrastructure, and technology,” he wrote in the letter dated December 20, 2012. “The Recovery Act provided over $400 million in funds to accomplish this. While strengthening border control is an important pillar of reform, we are also removing incentives to enter the United States illegally by preventing employers from hiring undocumented workers. Enforcement, however, is not the only solution. We must also require current undocumented workers who are in good standing to come out of the shadows and follow a responsible path to citizenship.”

The Obama administration has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants—as of August 2012, 1.4 million, more per month than George W. Bush did during his eight years in office.
¹⁶
And the border has never been more secure. Last year, Customs and Border Protection’s budget reached $11.7 billion, 64 percent more than in 2006, when the Republicans had the White House. There are now 651 miles of fence, 21,444 agents, and nine drones protecting the US-Mexico border.
¹⁷

All of that protection has paid off, and may have become
somewhat superfluous as immigration from Mexico has tapered off. A report of the Pew Hispanic Center, released in April 2012, revealed that “the largest wave of immigration in history from a single country [Mexico] to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—most of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.” The researchers explained that the decline was the result of many factors, including the weakened US economy, stronger economic conditions in Mexico (coupled with plunging birthrates in that country), and the perception—rooted in reality—of the dangers of crossing the border, with its heightened security, risk of deportation, and the threats from organized crime.
¹⁸

In Patchogue, people say things have changed, that immigrants no longer fear the police or the teenagers who used to harass them. It is no longer open season on Hispanics, they say, but it is all very anecdotal and very inconsistent.

After years without reports of attacks, a Hispanic man was assaulted and robbed in April of 2013 in the village of Patchogue. In the weeks that followed, and up to May 14, when
Newsday
published the story, there were other attacks in East Patchogue.
¹⁹
Mayor Pontieri said they appeared to be crimes of opportunity, not of hatred, and he was comforted by the fact that this time he was one of the first to hear about the attacks. “For me, the fact they came to see me first shows me we have made headway,” he told me. “It’s about trust.”
²⁰

Julio Espinoza says he doesn’t notice any racism, but then he never did. He is a busy man who spends his day rushing between his several stores—the business has grown to employ practically everyone in his family—and chatting with friends and clients who still come to him for advice and wisdom. The uncertainty he felt right after Lucero was killed has been replaced by the complacency that comes when one’s immediate world remains
untouched. His children are well and thriving, and the youngest has already graduated from the high school that Jeffrey Conroy and his friends once attended and that so divided the community with its separate areas for immigrants and natives.

Angel Loja, who practically disappeared after he testified in the trial and refused to speak to the press, breathes a heavy sigh when asked if things have changed.
“¡Ay, señora!”
he tells me every time I ask, as if he were dealing with a persistent but naive child who can’t quite comprehend the ways of the world. Racism permeates everything in Patchogue, says Loja, who has moved from the village and found a job driving a school bus. He is in a stable relationship and seems less sad than when I met him in 2011, but he remains angry at elected officials in Patchogue and in the state, and at the way he knows many people regard him because of the color of his skin or the slant of his eyes. He is trying to save $1,500 to pay the expenses related to the residency status he hopes to acquire soon.