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“Good Boys”?

Posted November 14, 2008 by Patrick Young, Esq.

The seven men charged with being members of the lynch mob that murdered Marcello Lucero are each individuals. Each one had his own distinct level of culpability or innocense in the commission of this crime. The justice system provides a forum for the law to assign responsibility and determine punishment.
The families and friends of each man are trying to differentiate the individual they knew from the act that was committed. Many are telling the press that their particular defendent was not really involved, didn’t know the others, or was simply following the crowd. Experience teaches that that may be true to a lesser or greater degree, but that some of the men described as “good kids” were throwing out warning signals for months or even years.
In this post I want to look at a few of the men accused of killing Lucero.
Jeffrey Conroy is accused of delivering Marcello Lucero’s death blow. He was a star athelete and the police believe he led the attackers.
Jeff Conroy’s girlfriend broke off with him when she found he had a Nazi tattoo on his thigh. When she confronted him about it, he said “It’s what I believe in.”
He was known at school for getting into fights with Latinos and fellow students described him as having a problem with “illegals”.
Chris Overton was arrested when he was fifteen for a home invasion by himself and other teens in which an African American man was murdered. Overton, who is White, was not charged in the death and the killing was not treated as a hate crime by Suffolk authorities. The killing drew particular attention because the dead man was found with his young son sleeping on his chest in the backyard of the house.
After Overton’s arrest in the Lucero case, a family friend said that the implication that this was race based was “unfair”.
Jordan Dasch has been described as a “typical Long Island” teen. As this site documented, his public myspace pages included Nazi emblems and he described himself as “Nazi Jew”. He also described his desire to kill Arabs.
Outside the school where the seven young men were educated, the word “Spic” was found scrawled on a stopsign by reporters. In town, the New York Post reports “Recently, residents said a pack of menacing teens had been harassing Hispanics walking down Main Street in Patchogue, screaming epithets and telling them to “get the f- - - out of here.” “
Fellow students say it was common for kids from the school to gather on Saturday nights to look for people to mug. “It was just for fun”, one teenager told a reporter. Many times Latinos were targetted, a practice so common, it had its own name-“Beaner Jumping”.