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First report on Patchogue Vigil

Posted November 14, 2008 by Patrick Young, Esq.

(By Pat Young) At 7:00pm people were streaming from the Latino precincts of Patchogue towards the memorial service for Marcelo Lucero. Lawn signs from the Long Island Immigrant Alliance lined the route. “Immigrants Welcomed Here” they proclaimed, next to a picture of the Statue of Liberty.
I arrived at the vigil for Marcello Lucero as it was beginning. About a third of the nearly two thousand people there were good people from all over Long Island, but most were from the same community in which Lucero lived. A sea of brown faces, interspersed with white and black surrounded the place where he had bled out his life.
People stood on the roofs of houses to get a better look, peered from windows, and stood on porches to get out of the misty rain. Some tried to defy the weather by lighting flickering candles.
Tiny, wet, heroic, Nadia Marin Molina stood at the front of the assembly. The talk was of the tragedy of the life that was lost and the hardships the community endured.
Sad, solemn, proud, and hopeful faces. They had lived in fear for months of being attacked in their own communities, yet they had walked through a dark night to the very spot where one of their own had been killed.
They brought their children to see the sacred place where there own skin color had earned a man a painful death.
They were not unafraid, but neither were they cowed tonight by the intelligent recognition of danger. Such people are the blocks upon which justice is built.

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