Home > Our Blog > UDPATED: EMT Testifies in Jeffery Conroy Trial

Blog Post

UDPATED: EMT Testifies in Jeffery Conroy Trial

Posted March 18, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch

UPDATED, 5:50pm

An emergency medical technician took the witness stand for the prosecution this afternoon in the murder trial of Jeffrey Conroy, who is accused of stabbing and killing Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero in a hate attack. This morning, the jury heard opening statements from prosecution and defense.

The EMT CC (Emergency Medical Technician- Critical Care), Christopher Schiera, testified that he had gone home to Holtsville for the night when his ambulance company sent out a dispatch for a driver, which he received at 12:01am on November 9. Because of staffing issues with volunteers, his ambulance crew sometimes lacked necessary personnel for an emergency situations; in this case, they needed a driver, and sent out a dispatch. He and his girlfriend, who was also an EMT, responded and were in their car within four minutes of receiving the call.

With limited time, Schiera told the two other EMTs working to take the ambulance to the scene, and that he would meet them there.

As they drove to 37 Funero Court, the road near the Patchogue train station where Lucero lay bleeding, Schiera and his girlfriend, seeing flashing police lights and an ambulance, first stopped on N. Ocean Avenue, thinking that the victim was there. The ambulance drove on, however, and approximately two minutes after arriving, Schiera realized that he had stopped at the wrong spot.

When Schiera, who is a dispatcher for the Medford Fire Department but also an EMT volunteer, reached the scene of the alleged attack around 12:14am, he said Lucero, who was bleeding, already appeared to be in some state of shock. “It basically is the natural transition between life and death,” he said during direct examination.

As an EMT CC, standard procedure for a patient losing blood would be to administer an IV drip, but Schiera’s certification had lapsed at the time, and he was unable to administer the drip, which he noted on cross-examination. No other EMTs on scene were qualified to give an IV.

Schiera noted, however, that when he arrived, Lucero was not speaking and his eyes were closing. Lucero was also breathing rapidly, and, in Schiera’s opinion, not adequately.

The EMTs put an oxygen mask on Lucero, but Schiera said it didn’t help much. “When they put it on, it appeared that his breathing wasn’t even sufficient enough to do any good,” he said.

Concerned that Lucero might have a chest puncture wound, the EMTs applied a special chest seal designed to slow bleeding without aggravating chest punctures, but the seal slid off of Lucero’s chest because of the blood.

During cross-examination, however, Schiera said that Lucero didn’t show the symptoms of a puncture wound. With that in mind, defense attorney William Keahon asked if any EMTs applied pressure to the wound—which would have been appropriate if there was no chest puncture. Schiera said that they did not.

As a general rule, Schiera said, it shouldn’t take an EMT crew longer than 20 minutes to leave the scene with a victim. The ambulance had arrived at 12:12am and left with Lucero at 12:25am, which means that the EMTs had him on the road 13 minutes after their arrival. At that point, according to Schiera, Lucero was responsive to “pain-only,” meaning that he would only communicate after some sort of tactile stimulation.

Police had told Schiera that a medical helicopter was on the way, to transport Lucero to Stony Brook University. Stony Brook has a level-one trauma center, which is better equipped to treat a stab-wound victim like Lucero. Police had secured part of the Briarcliffe College parking lot as a landing zone for the helicopter.

At 12:26, however, only a minute or so after the EMTs left the scene, Lucero went into cardiac arrest. Regulations don’t permit victims in cardiac arrest to be transported by air, so when the ambulance arrived at the college parking lot at 12:28am, they needed to reroute to Brookhaven Memorial Hospital. Brookhaven was only about three miles away from the scene of the alleged attack, but the hospital didn’t offer the same range of trauma service available at Stony Brook.

On the way to Brookhaven, the ambulance picked up a Holbrook Fire Department paramedic, who was certified to perform more advanced life-saving techniques. The stop to pick up the medic—from the side of the road—took only a few seconds, and they continued on to Brookhaven.

The ambulance arrived at Brookhaven at 12:34am, exactly 33 minutes from when Schiera had first received the dispatch from home.

During cross-examination, Schiera noted that he renewed his EMT CC certification in January 2009, at which point it was six to eight months delinquent. That means that his certification would have been roughly three to five months delinquent that night in November 2008.

The second witness to take the stand for the prosecution this afternoon was Jason Everhart, a self-described “good friend” of Jeff Conroy. I’ll have a brief update on his testimony later (I may head home first, or post it in the morning).

In summary, Everhardt, a 19-year-old Patchogue-Medford High School senior, testified to overhearing Conroy and the other co-defendants talk about “beating up Spanish people” while they were hanging out in Southaven Park on the night of Marcelo Lucero’s alleged murder. Everhardt also testified that, on a previous occasion, he had seen Conroy handle the knife allegedly used to kill Lucero.

On that occasion, Conroy had cut himself with the knife, according to Everhardt, but wasn’t bothered much: “He just wrapped a T-shirt around it; I’m sure it was fine from there.”

Tags : hate crimes, jeffrey conroy, marcelo lucero

Permalink Comments