Home > Our Blog > Despite Convictions in Hate Killing and Attacks, Jeffrey Conroy “Doesn’t Seem So Hateful,” Says NYT

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Despite Convictions in Hate Killing and Attacks, Jeffrey Conroy “Doesn’t Seem So Hateful,” Says NYT

Posted April 29, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch, Categories: Media Watch

A week and a half ago, Jeffrey Conroy was convicted of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime in the stabbing death of Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero.

Not surprisingly, reporters are lining up to interview the convicted killer, who will face 8 to 25 years in prison for the killing when he is sentenced on May 26.

Conroy’s defense lawyer, William Keahon, has already allowed a few reporters to have access to his client, with the prerequisite that they don’t ask any questions about Conroy’s recent hate crime convictions.

Newsday got there first:

Jeffrey Conroy has a strong gut reaction to the now-famous photograph of himself, handcuffed and walking ramrod-straight in his white jumpsuit, his ice-blue eyes staring straight ahead.

“That’s not me,” said the 19-year-old Medford man in his first interview since he was arrested in November 2008 on charges that he stabbed and killed Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero, 37, of Patchogue, after, prosecutors say, he and six other teens went on a mission to beat up Hispanics.

“I am not a racist. I am not a violent person. I am not a white supremacist,” said Conroy, who has a swastika tattoo on one thigh that he said he got “stupidly” on a dare. “People made a judgment about me.”

The Newsday article, written by Ann Givens, gave readers some insight into the dynamics of the interview. The newspaper was given access to Conroy on Keahon’s terms, of course, and Keahon’s presence at the interview seemed to influence how Conroy presented himself:

Throughout the hourlong interview Friday afternoon in the Suffolk County jail, Conroy, dressed in a white button-down shirt and a black suit jacket, remained stoic, often looking down at the table in front of him or at a wall. He smiled rarely, usually after being prodded by Keahon, who urged him to display the fun-loving side of his personality that Conroy said friends knew in school.

Today, The New York Times published a story about their interview with Conroy. The article, written by Manny Fernandez, largely sought to humanize the convicted killer, but came across as more than a touch obsequious towards the defense’s case.

Conroy was quoted about a possible future with his girlfriend (he said they want to have three kids), what he might have done with his life had he not been convicted of a hate killing (play midfield on a college lacrosse team), and the cramped size of his jail cell (if he stretches out his arms, he can touch both walls).

Personally, I believe that it’s important for journalists to write stories that humanize criminals, since so much news coverage is devoted to the monstrous side of a criminal’s personality. But sometimes an article can lose itself in the pleasant, innocent details of a criminal’s life without adequately reminding readers about the actions that made this person’s story newsworthy to begin with.

Keep in mind, any good reporter can draw out humanizing details in a criminal’s life—a pedophile who was popular among neighbors, a drug kingpin who funded an after-school program. The question is whether those details are relevant to the story, and whether or not those details are contextualized properly, in respect to the criminal’s actions.

Early in the Times article, the reader is told that there are two Jeff Conroys: one, a regular kid who liked sports and had a diverse group of friends; the other, a killer with white supremacist tattoos.

In interviews with Mr. Conroy, his father, his friends, his lacrosse coaches and his lawyer, one portrait of him emerges: that of a friendly, athletic teenager willing to stick up for others, of someone who counted several Hispanics among his closest friends, including the girl he had been dating off and on for years, Pamela Suarez, who is Bolivian.

Then there is the young man that prosecutors, Latino advocates and even some of the jurors see: a gullible, aggressive teenager with a swastika tattoo on his thigh who stabbed Mr. Lucero in the chest that night out of anger, and then lied in court when he blamed someone else for the crime.

In general, the article focuses much of its attention on interviews with Conroy’s friends and family members. Instead of a killer, those acquaintances see the friendly, upstanding kid that they knew years ago:

“People are going to say I’m naïve,” said Marc Negrin, 52, a close friend of Mr. Conroy’s father. “People are going to say I’m stupid. People are going to say he’s my best friend’s son. They can say all that. But you know what, I’m a grown man. I’ve got three healthy kids that all do great in school. I’m a good judge of character. And he said he didn’t do it and I believe him. Because he’s never given me, in all the years I’ve known his family, never given me a reason to think any different. He’s never lied.”

In the article, some of the evidence that led to Conroy’s conviction—his swastika tattoos, his repeated participation in group attacks on Latinos—is presented through the same narrative used by Conroy’s defense lawyer at trial. Other evidence, like the four-inch knife wound that Conroy inflicted on Marcelo Lucero, isn’t mentioned at all.

On the swastika:

Mr. Conroy said he had his best friend give him a tattoo of a swastika on his thigh a few months before the stabbing “as a joke,” and because his friend had dared him to do it.

On the hate attacks:

The trial made clear that Mr. Conroy was not, initially at least, the most aggressive of the teenagers on that November night. Mr. Conroy neither came up with the idea to go look for Hispanics to beat up nor did he suggest that they drive to Patchogue to look for victims; one or more of the other teenagers did. He testified that his plan was to watch his six friends beat up another Hispanic person but not to take part in the fighting himself.

Since the overall framework of the article seemed to give credence to the defense case, I was somewhat surprised that the article didn’t mention Keahon’s courtroom suggestion that Lucero’s knife wound was treatable, and that poor ambulance services contributed to the Ecuadorian immigrant’s death.

During the trial, the Times focused on this theory in several articles (click here for the initial piece), as if it might explain Lucero’s death. But even Keahon acknowledged in his closing statements that the performance of the ambulance crew should not factor into the innocence or guilt of his client.

As I said, I believe that journalists should seek to humanize the criminals who they cover. That’s an important and underperformed journalistic duty.

But as a newspaper article, this piece inundates readers with too much of the defense perspective, pushing the fact that Conroy was recently convicted of a hate killing into the background.

Readers should be reminded more emphatically that Jeffrey Conroy wasn’t thrust into the public spotlight because he once stopped a person from stealing a bike, or because he once mowed a family friend’s lawn as a favor.

He’s in the news because he was convicted of “beaner hopping”—roaming Suffolk streets with his friends and looking for Hispanics to beat up.

He’s in the news because he stabbed and killed a man in an attack motivated by ethnicity.

He’s in the news because these attacks were part of a much broader, unacknowledged trend in Suffolk County.

Let’s not forget that.

Tags : hate crimes, jeffrey conroy, manny fernandez, marcelo lucero, suffolk

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