Hunting Season
Authors: Mirta Ojito
Praise for
Hunting Season
“An account that is as unflinching as it is important. Both an incisive reconstruction of a heartbreaking murder and an unsparing diagnosis of a national malady . . . with
Hunting Season
Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary.”
—
JUNOT DÍAZ
, author of
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
“Mirta Ojito tells a powerful story, connecting us with the real-life people who are all too often left out of the immigration debate. In doing so, Ojito plumbs the depths of what it means to be an American, a nation of immigrants, whose narrative and identity are deeply tied to this journey of arrival and assimilation—and sometimes rejection. This book should be required reading in any community grappling with the issues of immigration, which often remain abstract and divisive. Ojito helps us understand ourselves as a nation, whose motto,
E pluribus unum,
‘Out of many, one,’ celebrates our unity in our diversity, as she does in this book. A powerful story, masterfully written, imbued with a deep, compassionate, and healing intelligence.”
—
JULIA ALVAREZ
, author of
A Wedding in Haiti
“An Ecuadorean immigrant’s ethnically motivated murder is at the heart of Mirta Ojito’s compelling and complex narrative; but beyond laying down the tragic machinations of prejudice, she gives us an uplifting tale about the universality—and wonder—of ordinary folk—in this case, Latinos—pursuing the American dream. All this is told with the authority of a much-respected journalist, whose own experience as an immigrant lends this book the depth, insights, and poignancy that only someone of her experience can convincingly—and rightfully—convey.”
—
OSCAR HIJUELOS
, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
“Through a powerful and true story,
Hunting Season
brings to life how an all-American town confronts immigration. This book reveals not only the shortcomings of our immigration system but also reminds us how we might think of each other and how we treat all of our neighbors, whether or not they look like us. This is our human story.”
—
WES MOORE
, author of
The Other Wes Moore
“With the hyperbolic rhetoric of immigration spewing from every medium, we forget that there are dreams on both sides of the divide that has cleaved United States society and threatens our sense of self. Respected journalist Mirta Ojito writes about immigration from the perspective of those who have lived it: from the Italian-descendant mayor of Patchogue to a naturalized waiter from Colombia, from undocumented Ecuadorean laborers to teenagers pumped on adrenaline with not enough to do on a fall night—to heartbroken parents on two continents. This is an important book. I couldn’t put it down.”
—
ESMERALDA SANTIAGO
, author of
When I Was Puerto Rican
HUNTING SEASON
Immigration and Murder
in an All-American Town
MIRTA OJITO
B
EACON
P
RESS
· B
OSTON
For my children:
Juan Arturo, Lucas, and Marcelo,
Americans in the truest sense of the word.
And for my father,
Orestes Ojito,
who made it all possible.
Hate, as a single word might lead us to believe, is not a single emotion or behavior, but instead stands for a variety of complex psychological phenomena that can be expressed in many different ways by different people. Why some people express “hate” in the form of criminal behavior is something that we do not yet fully understand.
N
ATHAN
H
ALL
,
H
ATE
C
RIME
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
2
Painted Birds in the Air
CHAPTER
7
A Murder in the Suburbs
CHAPTER
9
A Little Piece of Heaven
AUTHOR’S NOTE
To re-create events that transpired fifty, twenty, or five years ago is always an act of faith that depends mostly—but not only—on the kindness of those who witnessed the events and on their willingness to share. The other way to re-create events is following a paper trail, and I’ve made liberal use of that option, mining court records, transcripts, and news accounts.
I’m lucky and grateful that many people in Patchogue, New York, and Gualaceo, Ecuador, shared their stories with me. I asked them to remember in great detail events that happened years before we met. Since it is difficult to recall precise details of conversations held so long ago, I’ve opted not to use quotation marks unless I’m quoting from a published or aired source, such as a newspaper story or a TV clip, using transcripts of interviews, confessions, or court proceedings, or referring to notes I took when the words were uttered.
Only nine people know what happened on the night of November 8, 2008. One who knew—Marcelo Lucero—is dead; his friend, Angel Loja, spoke to me. But the seven young men who
are still in prison for attacking Lucero and Loja and killing Lucero refused to, as did all their parents but two—Bob Conroy, the father of Jeffrey Conroy, and Denise Overton, the mother of Christopher Overton. Their cooperation allowed me to convey a more nuanced portrayal of their children.
From prison, Jeffrey Conroy wrote me a letter, which for more than a year I kept on my bulletin board, next to the picture of a serious-looking Lucero as a fourth-grade student in Ecuador, his body partly blocking a map of North America. In his letter, dated July 16, 2011, Conroy wrote that he believed I would “write a fair book” and that my work would be “balanced and respectful.” For more than three years I’ve labored to live up to that expectation and to honor the stories of those in Patchogue and Gualaceo who opened their lives to my curiosity and scrutiny.
PROLOGUE
On November 8, 2008, having had a few beers and an early dinner, Marcelo Lucero, an undocumented Ecuadorian immigrant, took a late-night stroll with his childhood friend Angel Loja near the train tracks in Patchogue, a seaside village of twelve thousand people in Suffolk County, New York, a county that only three years earlier had been touted by
Forbes
magazine as one of the safest and wealthiest in the United States.
1
It is also one of the most segregated counties.
2
Before the mild moonlit night was over, Lucero was stabbed and killed by a gaggle of teenagers from neighboring towns, who had gone out hunting for “beaners,” the slur that, as some of them later told police, they used for Latinos. Earlier that night, they had harassed and beaten another Hispanic man—a naturalized US citizen from Colombia named Héctor Sierra. The teenagers also confessed to attacking Hispanics at least once a week.
Lucero was not the first immigrant killed by an enraged mob in the United States, and he most certainly will not be the last. At least two other immigrants were killed in the Northeast in 2008,
but Lucero’s case is especially poignant because he was killed by a high school star athlete in an all-American town where people of mostly Italian and Irish descent proudly display US flags on the Fourth of July and every year attend a Christmas parade on Main Street. If it happened here, it can happen anywhere.
Patchogue, in central Long Island, is only about sixty miles from Manhattan—far enough to escape the city’s noise, dirt, and angst, but close enough to feel splashes of its excitement, pluck, and glamour. Lucero, who probably didn’t know about the
Forbes
ranking of the village as an idyllic place to live and raise children, had come from Ecuador to Patchogue in 1993 on the heels of others from his hometown who for thirty years now have been slowly and quietly making their way to this pocket of lush land named by the Indians who once inhabited it.
In Ecuador, too, Lucero had lived in a small village called Gualaceo. The town has lost so many of its people to Patchogue that those who remain call it Little Patchogue, a way to honor the dollars flowing there from Long Island. Month by month, remittances from New York have helped Gualaceños prosper despite a profound and long-lasting national economic crisis that forced the government to toss its national currency and adopt the US dollar more than a decade ago.
The day before he was killed, Lucero, thirty-seven, had been talking about going home. Over the years he had sent his family about $100,000—money earned working low-paying jobs—to buy land and build a three-story house he planned to share with his mother, his sister, and his nephew. He was eager to join them. The sister, Rosario, had asked him to be a father figure for her son. It’s time to go, Lucero told his younger brother, Joselo, who also lived in Patchogue.
3
“He was tired,” Joselo recalled. “He had done enough.”
Lucero was planning to leave before Christmas, an early present for their ailing mother. I’ll take you to the airport, Joselo promised. He never got the chance.
I read about the murder of Marcelo Lucero when it was first reported in the news, but I learned some of the more intimate details through a Columbia University graduate student, Angel Canales, who had immediately jumped on the story and was working on a documentary about it for his master’s thesis. The story resonated with me for several reasons, not the least of them being my own condition as an immigrant. Though I never felt the burden of being in the country “illegally,” I have carried a different kind of stigma.
I came from Cuba in 1980, at sixteen, aboard a boat named
Mañana,
as part of a boatlift that brought more than one hundred twenty-five thousand Cuban refugees from the port of Mariel to the shores of South Florida in the span of five months. Several thousand of those refugees had committed crimes in Cuba and kept at it in their new country. Quickly, quicker than I could learn English or even understand what was happening around me, all of us were tainted by the unspeakable actions of a few. We became saddled with the label “Marielitos,” which carried a negative connotation, and with the narrative of
Scarface,
the unfortunate but popular film by Brian De Palma in which Al Pacino played a “Marielito” drug lord. It was a difficult stigma to shake. In 2005, when a book I wrote about the boatlift was published, people still felt the need to point to my story as a rarity—a successful “Marielita” who had done well and had even made it to the
New York Times.
In fact, the opposite was true. My story was not unique. Most Mariel refugees were honest, decent, hard-working people. The exceptions had given us all a bad name. Those experiences taught me what it’s like to live under the shadow of an unpopular label, and while “illegal” is not as detrimental as “criminal,” it is close, and it has endured far longer than the “Marielito” curse.
The murder of Marcelo Lucero also resonated with me for a professional reason. It brought back memories of a story I had written for the
New York Times
on September 30, 1996, about a Hudson Valley village called Haverstraw, where, according to the
1990 census, 51 percent of the residents were Hispanic, although everyone knew the ratio was closer to 70 percent. Just thirty miles north of Manhattan, Haverstraw had been a magnet for Puerto Ricans since the 1940s. In more recent years, Dominicans had followed. The mayor, Francis “Bud” Wassmer, told me he no longer recognized the village where he had been born and raised. The public library carried an extensive selection of bilingual books, a local store that once sold men’s suits was selling work boots, the strains of
merengue
spilled from the pink windows of riverfront Victorian mansions, and the old candy store had closed down while eighteen bodegas had opened.