Some of you may remember reading about the murder of Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue, NY in November 2008.
The attack has horrified and puzzled many in this comfortable Suffolk County village of 11,700. Prosecutors have labeled it a hate crime and County Executive Steve Levy called the defendants, who have pleaded not guilty, “white supremacists.” And some immigrant advocates on Long Island have described the attack as a reflection of widespread anti-Latino sentiment and racial intolerance in Suffolk County.
Crossposted from Blue Wave News
Jeffrey Conroy, who was a 17-year-old senior at Patchogue-Medford High School at the time of the attack, was convicted of manslaughter as a hate crime for stabbing Mr. Lucero in the chest.
In her opening statement, Ms. O’Donnell described how the teenagers, including Mr. Conroy, roamed the village of Patchogue that Saturday evening for one purpose: to find a Hispanic person to assault.
“They were not in Patchogue looking to go to a party,” said Ms. O’Donnell, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County. They were, instead, “looking for blood — specifically, Mexican blood.” They called the sport Mexican-hopping or beaner-hopping, she said.
Ms. O’Donnell told the jurors that Mr. Conroy expressed his feelings of white supremacy, both in the tattoos on his body and in the statements that he made to others, and that he made Hispanics targets because of their ethnicity and because he “felt these people were easy targets” who were unlikely to call the police...
When they spotted Mr. Lucero walking with a friend near the train station in Patchogue, they surrounded him, she said...Mr. Conroy, she said, took out his knife and thrust it into Mr. Lucero’s upper right chest.
You may wonder why I'm bringing this case up again all these months later. Certainly, part of it is to demonstrate the hatred and violence that is fueled by the xenophobic treatment of much of our discussion about immigration reform. But that's not the only reason.
Approximately a month before the sentencing hearing for Jeffrey Conroy, the New York Times decided to publish an interview they had with him last week in what can only be described as a blatant attempt to rehabilitate the image of this young man.
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.
In this story, we learn that Jeffrey Conroy loves his family and worries about them, feels sympathy for the Lucero family, got a swastika tattooed on his thigh as "a joke," was a mentor to some of the children who participated in his father's non-profit youth sports league, and stood up to two white men who were about to steel the bike of a Hispanic man because he "felt bad" for him. I have no way of knowing whether any of this is true or not. I'm not here to judge. But I think this section of the article is the clincher.
Mr. Cleary, the family friend, said it seemed as if Mr. Conroy was a follower at times, though he thought of himself as a leader.
“It’s a terrible Jekyll and Hyde story to me, and I don’t believe a lot of it,” Mr. Cleary said. “I believe that he got roped into events that others had started, and being 17 and filled with testosterone, sometimes you do things that get the best of you before you can think about it clearly.”
And then, the very next sentence...
During the trial, prosecutors said that Mr. Conroy’s intent to kill was evident because the entire blade went into Mr. Lucero’s chest area and was stopped only by the handle.
So when a white boy goes "Mexican-hopping" and winds up stabbing a Latino man in the chest...it's peer pressure and testosterone at work????!!!!!! Can you imagine what Mr. Cleary would be saying if a gang of Mexican boys had gone "European hopping" and one of them stabbed a white man to death?
I'm trying very hard to deal with the anger I feel for Jeffrey Conroy - to think about the kinds hatred he must have been fed to commit such a terrible crime. That's because I truly believe that criminals are made...not born that way. And if we're ever going to reduce the violence that so plagues this country, we're going to have to try and understand how/why it happens (not as an alternative to accountability, but as a way of preventing it from happening in the first place).
But where I'll let my anger flourish into action is in thinking about why the NYT chose to try to understand Jeffrey Conroy, but are content to remain silent when thousands of other - mostly brown and black - teenagers are cast as superpredators to be feared and locked up for life. Young people like Joe Sullivan, a mentally disabled young black man who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole because a Florida jury found him guilty of raping an elderly woman when he was 13 years old.
I can think of no other more powerful way than this NYT article to demonstrate the privilege of middle-class whiteness.