Hunting Season (26 page)

Margarita Espada, a Puerto Rican playwright, wrote
What Killed Marcelo Lucero?
which premiered in 2009 at Hofstra University. There were a dozen actors, most with no experience or training, in the play, which portrayed real events and characters surrounding the murder, including an anti-immigrant politician, day laborers, a white non-Hispanic family, and a Hispanic family. Much of the dialogue came from news accounts.
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It played in different venues on Long Island until, one day in the spring of 2011, it came to Patchogue.

There were about two hundred people in the audience, which was white and Latino, young and old. The bilingual play felt more like a conversation starter than a work of art. It had no ending, and Espada said she had left it open because the ending was yet to be written. It was up to the people of Suffolk County to write it.

Bob Conroy sat in the sixth row to the right of the stage. He wore black jogging pants and a blue T-shirt with a red wind-breaker and black cap that he did not take off. He chewed gum and watched intently as the events of his recent life unfolded on the stage. An actor representing a Latino worker riding a bicycle was attacked by kids with a bat. “Go back to Mexico!” they yelled, and they stole his bike. Thugs kicked a boy and emptied his knapsack. “I was half expecting to find a burrito,” said one of the attackers before discarding the bag.

Except for his jaws furiously working the gum, Conroy didn’t move. At the end, the actors gathered on the stage around a casket surrounded by all the flags of Latin America. They brought it down to the audience. Then Espada interrupted. “Stop!” she ordered, addressing the actors. Turning to the audience, she asked, “How can we create a dialogue?”

Luis Valenzuela, the immigration advocate, spoke first and reminded the audience that during the year that Lucero was killed, six anti-immigrant bills had been introduced in the legislature. One college professor said that after Lucero was killed, he had been afraid of being Latino, for the first time in his life.

A few other people spoke, and then Conroy asked for the microphone. Everyone turned to face him, and a hush descended in the theater. It was the first time he had publicly spoken since his son had been arrested. He cleared his throat.

“I’m sorry for what happened, but I felt that the problems of a nation fell on a seventeen-year-old child,” he said, repeating the theme that seems to fuel his anger.

Then he went on, in a somewhat rambling but seemingly heartfelt talk.

“At seventeen you can’t drink, you can’t drive alone. He dated a Spanish girl. My first wife was Spanish. This has opened my eyes. You guys [actors] did a good job, but I take exception to one thing: it was not in the heart,” he said, referring to the wound on Lucero’s torso, which in fact had been closer to the shoulder than the chest. “It was considered a nonthreatening wound that wasn’t treated for forty minutes.”

Valenzuela interrupted him to say, “I support you one hundred percent in that it wasn’t your son alone. This is society’s issue.”

Conroy said he was “livid” that his son had been described in the papers as a “ringleader.” “It could have been any of your children,” he said to the audience that remained riveted by his words.

“Absolutely,” Valenzuela agreed.

“Know the facts before you label somebody,” Conroy said before sitting down eight minutes after he took the microphone.

There was a smattering of applause, but a man in the audience got up and urged everyone not to forget that there was only one victim in the attack against Lucero, and that victim was not Jeffrey Conroy; it was Marcelo Lucero. Toward the end of the
evening, Reverend Wolter, who had encouraged Conroy to attend the event, said he was pleased with the way it had turned out. “For the first time in this community everyone had a seat at the table,” he said.

But not everyone was at the table that evening; the Lucero family did not attend.

On the evening of February 16, 2009, Doña Rosario arrived in New York City to see her surviving son, Joselo, and to attend hearings scheduled before the trials of the teenagers accused of killing her son. It was the first time she traveled outside Ecuador.

She arrived at JFK Airport, accompanied by her daughter, Isabel, and her grandson, three-year-old Isaac. Crying and shaking, she clung to Joselo, who was waiting with a bouquet of white roses and eucalyptus. The two were speechless for several minutes, but nearby reporters could hear Joselo’s tear-choked whispers, “Mi mamá, mi mamá.”

Joselo took off his black jacket and delicately draped it around his mother’s small frame. The family left the airport in a car driven by Sgt. Lola Quesada, who now worked as a police liaison to the Latino community and had gained enormous relevance in the community in the days immediately following Lucero’s death.
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Nine months later, in November 2009, Doña Rosario was back to mark the first anniversary of her son’s death at an inter-faith service in St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue. Surprising everyone in the church, Steve Levy approached the Lucero family in their front pew and spoke to them quietly. He said he was sorry for their loss and thanked Joselo for speaking out about his brother. Joselo just nodded. A picture taken by a
Newsday
photographer shows Doña Rosario bundled in an oversized dark coat, shaking Levy’s outstretched hand. Officer Quesada is between the two, most likely translating. Joselo Lucero stares straight ahead with hands deep in his pant pockets.

When it was his time to speak during the service, Joselo addressed
Levy directly. “You have a second chance to change, to do what you did wrong before, to now do better things.” This time it was Levy who stared straight ahead.
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Afterward, Mayor Pontieri told reporters he had arranged for Levy to come to the service. He admitted that he should have alerted the Lucero family, but said he had not thought about it.

Joselo was fuming.

“I feel like I was ambushed here,” he said. “There are people I don’t want to talk to.”

Two months later, the people’s case against Jeffrey Conroy reached the courtroom of New York Supreme Court judge Robert W. Doyle in Riverhead, Long Island.

CHAPTER 10

TRIAL AND PUNISHMENT

The night before, the attorney laid out her new black suit, the one she had bought especially for this trial. After eighteen months of preparation, countless hours poring over documents, and entire weekends spent thinking up strategies and opening arguments, it had come down to superstition: Megan O’Donnell, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County with twelve years of experience, always wore black the first and last day of a trial. She felt it brought her good luck. With the Lucero case, she needed it.
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Much more than the fate of a young man was at stake in this case. What would it telegraph to the world if in Suffolk County, Long Island, a bunch of kids could get away with the murder of an undocumented immigrant? With so much media attention surrounding the case, at times it seemed as if the whole world was watching, which was not entirely true. For the most part, the coverage was local, about half of it from Spanish-language media outlets, though reporters from as far away as Amsterdam had shown a fleeting interest in the story in the days after the murder. But advocacy groups—both local and national—as well
as the federal government were certainly paying attention. On September 1, 2009, six months before the first day of the trial, the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division and the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York initiated a joint investigation of the Suffolk County Police Department. O’Donnell, of course, was aware that her case was in the spotlight. Something Jeffrey Conroy had boasted to his friends right after the stabbing remained on her mind: “Imagine if I get away with this?”
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She didn’t think of Jeff and the other six who had been arraigned as young men who had made a mistake. Their behavior had been gang-like, she thought, and her job was to stop gangs from terrorizing the place she called home.

Megan O’Donnell was born in Patchogue. Her father, a banker, is an immigrant from Canada. Her mother, a legal secretary, is from North Carolina. When O’Donnell was seven, the family moved to Virginia. She became interested in law in eighth grade, when a teacher organized a mock Revolutionary War trial. O’Donnell played the lawyer representing the Americans. She lost her case but to this day thinks she should have won.

O’Donnell started college in Virginia, but midway through returned to New York and finished her political science degree at Stony Brook University. Her law degree is from Hofstra University, also on Long Island. She was ambivalent at first as to what role she would play as a lawyer upon graduation, but in the summer after her first year of law school an internship at the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office led to her decision to become a prosecutor. O’Donnell graduated in May, took the bar exam in August, and the following month began working in the Suffolk County District Court prosecuting misdemeanors.

Her first trial involved a woman who had been inappropriately groped in a restaurant kitchen where she worked, but O’Donnell quickly moved on to the Major Crimes Bureau, prosecuting felonies such as burglary, rape, and murder. After three years, she was assigned to the special investigations unit, prosecuting
gun-related and gang violence. The assignment was random, but it became a passion for her, and she stayed for seven years. By her own account she is very focused, organized, methodical, analytical, and determined. In college, she took up running and is still at it, usually jogging at 5:00 a.m. four days a week.

It surprised no one when O’Donnell’s boss, District Attorney Thomas Spota, assigned her Jeffrey Conroy’s prosecution. At the time, she was one of 185 assistant district attorneys in the county, but one of only about twelve who could handle a homicide case.

As O’Donnell wrestled with the case, the biggest issue was not Jeff’s culpability. Despite the fact that no one, not even Angel Loja, had seen him plunge the knife into Lucero’s upper torso, the evidence pointed to him and so did his own confession. Age was not a problem either because in New York State anyone over sixteen can be tried as an adult. Jeff was seventeen at the time of the attack. If there would be any leniency in his case, it would have to come from the judge at the time of sentencing if Jeff were found guilty, not from the district attorney’s office.

There was no question about the nature of the crime either. All the boys had confessed to attacking Lucero and Loja because of their ethnicity. During the confessions, the young men had not said why they had gone out that night to pick on Hispanic men, but during their interviews with prosecutors and with probation department officers they had revealed somewhat of a motivation. Their statements varied, but they all shared fears that immigrants were taking jobs away from US citizens, enrolling in schools, and therefore causing tax money to be used in programs such as teaching teachers to speak Spanish, and not paying taxes into the system. O’Donnell had heard it all before. Her sense was that the kids were mirroring what their parents believed, what they said most nights around the dinner table.
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In an incident file report prepared shortly after his arrest, Jeff is quoted as saying that though he didn’t consider himself a “white supremacist” and didn’t belong to any such group, he followed white supremacist activities on the Internet and held “racist thoughts,” having been “raised
in a home where his parents held racist beliefs.”
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(Conroy vehemently disputes this and doubts that his son could have said any such thing.)

The issue then was intent. If Jeff intended to cause Lucero’s death that meant he should be charged with murder, but if his intent was to harm him, albeit seriously, that would result in a charge of manslaughter. But O’Donnell and her colleagues did not have to decide. They took their case to a grand jury.
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Ultimately, the grand jury charged Jeff with seven crimes. The most serious charges, the ones that could send him to prison for life, were murder in the second degree as a hate crime (meaning he intentionally caused Lucero’s death by stabbing him), and manslaughter in the first degree as a hate crime (meaning that while the intention may have been to cause serious injury to Lucero, Jeff caused his death by stabbing him). The other charges were gang assault in the first degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree, and attempted assault in the second degree as a hate crime for the attacks on Héctor Sierra, Angel Loja, and Octavio Cordovo.
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It was, up to that point, the biggest case of O’Donnell’s career. She was thirty-seven when she got the case and thirty-nine when it finally made its way to the court on March 18, 2010, a Thursday. On that first day of
People of the State of New York v. Jeffrey Conroy,
O’Donnell put everything aside—politics, media, pressure from advocacy groups—and applied all her focus and considerable energy to the one thing that really mattered to her: winning.

The courtroom of Judge Doyle was silent and expectant when O’Donnell rose from her chair behind a polished wooden table in front of the judge and addressed the court and the members of the jury—seven men, five women, and four alternates.

“Your Honor,” she began, “madam foreperson, counsel, on November 8, 2008, the hunt was on.” And then O’Donnell was off, describing in great detail how two separate groups of friends with different lives and separate plans collided at Funaro Court near midnight on that date with disastrous and life-altering results.

“Seven teenagers, one of which was the defendant, Jeffrey Conroy, wilding, roaming the streets of Patchogue for one purpose and one purpose only, to find a Hispanic person to randomly and physically attack,” she said.