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Issues of Race Permeate Marcelo Lucero Murder Case, NY Times Says

Posted March 26, 2010 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Hate Watch

While the November 2008 attack on Marcelo Lucero appeared “brutally simple”—with seven teens targeting Marcelo Lucero and his friend Angel Loja as part of their hunt for “Mexicans”—evidence presented in the trial of accused murderer Jeffrey Conroy has painted a more complex picture of the role of race and ethnicity in the alleged attack, according to an article posted today by The New York Times’ Manny Fernandez.

The trial has been underway for just over a week, and this is the first broad review of the proceedings from Fernandez.

From the article:

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — The crime seemed brutally simple: Seven high school students attacked two Hispanic immigrants in Patchogue in November 2008, prosecutors said, after a night of “Mexican hopping,” a sport made of assaulting Latino men in Suffolk County on eastern Long Island.

Yet, more than a year later, in a room in State Supreme Court here, the picture that has emerged of the crime and the role that race played in it is proving to be far more complex, and even contradictory.

Six of the teenagers are white, and one has a black mother and a Puerto Rican father. Jeffrey Conroy, the teenager accused of fatally stabbing one of the immigrants, Marcelo Lucero, has a tattoo of a swastika on his leg. But the young woman Mr. Conroy had been dating on and off for years and had spoken to earlier that night in November, Pamela Suarez, is Bolivian.

In the selection of victims, it seems an assumption was made that any Hispanic person encountered would be Mexican. One victim chased earlier that night was an English-speaking Colombian waiter who came to America in 1973, long before the teenagers were born. Two others, Mr. Lucero and his friend Angel Loja, were born in Ecuador.

“We’re not Mexican,” Mr. Loja said he told the teenagers that November night near a train station in Patchogue, moments before the attack.

To illustrate the complex role that race played in the crime, Fernandez cites an exchange between Loja and Jose Pacheco—a black and Hispanic teen who was one of the attackers—which Loja recounted in court last week. During the attack, Loja called Pacheco a “nigger,” Loja testified, after Pacheco had first called him the same thing. Fernandez recounts:

At one point, Mr. Loja said he told the teenager who is black and Hispanic, Jose Pacheco, “I’m the same color as you.” He also admitted in court that he had used a racial slur to refer to Mr. Pacheco after, he said, Mr. Pacheco used the slur against him.

Fernandez also interviewed Mark Potok, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which issued a scathing report on hate crime in Suffolk County in September 2009. Potok said that having Latino roots or friends doesn’t mean you can’t commit a hate crime:

Mr. Potok said he saw no contradictions in the fact that Mr. Pacheco is black and Hispanic and that Mr. Conroy has black and Hispanic friends. Mr. Potok spoke of a white supremacist gang in California called the Nazi Low Riders that has many members who are Latino or have Latina companions.

“These kinds of contradictions are much more common than anyone expects,” Mr. Potok said. “When I look at this group of defendants, I wouldn’t be looking for ideological consistency. I think that the idea that Latino immigrants were somehow disposable people was in the atmosphere in Suffolk County and very much sunk into these kids’ brains. It’s not so much that they’re following a strict ideology. In a sense, the community around them has identified a group of people who are somehow less.”

Tags : hate crimes, jeffrey conroy, marcelo lucero, southern poverty law center, splc

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