A MURDER IN PATCHOGUE
REVERBERATES HERE

By Dan Rattiner

Last Saturday night, seven high school kids at a party in Medford told friends they were going out to "get a Mexican," something that friends of these kids say is a sort of thing some of them do in that community on a Saturday night. It means beat up an illegal alien. In this case, however, these teenagers went out, cornered two "Mexicans" in a parking lot near the Patchogue Railroad Station, and then, while the others watched, one of them killed one of the men with a knife.

The man who died was Marcello Lucero, 38, a day laborer who had lived in the community for 16 years and sent the money he makes to his mother in Ecuador. He was stabbed in the chest by Jeffrey Conroy, a senior at Patchogue-Medford High School, who is on both the wrestling team and the lacrosse team, and, until now, expected to be college bound with an athletic scholarship. The others cheered him on while he did it.

Lucero was not alone when he was killed. Also surrounded was his younger brother, Joselo Lucero, also an illegal, who slipped away when Marcelo was attacked, then immediately called 911, so that the police could quickly arrive to arrest this crew, which they did.

Hate crime does not rise to murder in cold blood very often, and so the coverage of this event - which took place just a 45 minute drive away from the Hamptons - appeared on the front page of The New York Times, on Fox News, CNN, the BBC, The International Herald Tribune and newspapers and television stations around the world.

The first comment made about this murder, by Steve Levy, who is the Suffolk County supervisor, was that "This would have been a one-day story if it had happened in Nassau County rather than in Suffolk County." The comment was entirely devoid of concern for the family of the victim, and seemed to suggest that a heightened reaction by the media to this event was an unfair attack on his own particular illegal immigrant policy. Levy has, indeed, created a wide range of new laws in the County which are aimed at preventing illegal Hispanics from finding work, congregating anywhere in public or even staying here. He condones midnight raids and anything else necessary to get them either out of this area, or deported out of the country and back to where they came from. Without any humanitarian side to his new laws, many in the media believe these laws might encourage violent acts by white supremacists and others of their stripe.

In recent years, this newspaper has been a strong proponent of a group that wants to cecede eastern Long Island from Suffolk County in order to start our own county.

One of the reasons many of us have felt we ought to break away is because of the largely intolerant attitudes in Suffolk County, particularly the southwest end of it.

If you look at the history of hate crimes and intolerance on Long Island, you notice a very unusual confluence of them in the southwestern part of the Island. Over the years, there has been nothing like it in Nassau County to the west or our East End, and that is a fact.

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was based in the southwestern part of Suffolk County, holding its biggest rallies in Sayville and East Islip.

In the late 1930s, there was a camp called "Camp Siegfried," located in Yaphank - where the Brookhaven Lab is today - that held torchlight and uniformed Nazi rallies demanding death to the Jews in America and world conquest for the Master Race. Camp Siegfried went on for three years, from 1936 to 1939, without county interference. Some of these rallies were attended by 20,000 people. The Nazis even marched through downtown Patchogue, with County approval.

In recent years, there have been more attacks and hate crimes in this community of towns, which include Holbrook, Farmingville, Ronkonkoma, Medford, Patchogue, Sayville and East Islip.

In 2001, two Mexican day laborers were trapped and beaten, nearly to death, in Farmingville. In 2003, a home owned by a Mexican family was burned to the ground in Farmingville. Just three weeks ago there were more than 100 leaflets placed on the windshield wipers of vehicles parked at the Deer Park Railroad Station, urging people to join the KKK. They were placed there by the Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Some of this may help explain the unbelievable just-for-fun hobby of some of the local high school kids, which is to go out and beat up people who will not fight back because they fear the police will bring them to the attention of immigration. There is an apparent belief by some of the teenagers in the community that this sort of behavior is okay.

Levy, who himself grew up and attended high school in the southwestern part of Suffolk County - he went to Sachem High School - might do well to look at his initial knee jerk reaction to this shocking crime. The undercurrent of intolerance there goes back generations.

Of course, the southwestern part of the county is only a small part of the whole county. When horrified reactions barreled in from everywhere else in the county about his comment, he did a whole 360. He is not a bigot. He is currently espousing a five-point plan to right himself. He is seeking donations for the victim's family; he is asking religious leaders to preach the need for tolerance; he's called for schools to consider using the services of the Anti-Bias Task Force; he's going to display the county's anonymous 800-220-TIPS phone number more prominently; and he's created a Hispanic liaison to the county police department.

What he has not yet done, however, is say he will readdress and possibly repeal the anti-Hispanic laws that his administration has passed in the last three years and that we in other parts of the county continue to live with.

As for how this specific crime has been dealt with, consider this. As things stand now, the killer, who said he was going out to get a Mexican and then once out bragged to the other seven with him that he would not only "get" but also kill one and then did - is charged not with murder in the first degree by the County, but with manslaughter. Really.

To paraphrase Harry Golden, who said "Only in America," I would add "Only in southwestern Suffolk County."

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