Hunting Season (28 page)

The folding knife used in the killing was displayed for the first time during the testimony of Officer Michael Richardsen, the one who had patted down Jeff and at first missed the knife. A large photo of the knife, blood still staining the blade, was shown to the jurors. The black handle was curved, and the blade had a thick, serrated edge.
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Although the defense tried to show that Jeff had a diverse and loyal group of friends, and therefore could not have harbored ill feelings toward any group of people, some of the most damning testimonies against him came from his oldest and best friends. First, Keith Brunjes, who had known him since the two were about eight years old, testified how one day in May 2008, when the two were watching the HBO prison series
Oz,
they decided to imitate the prisoners in the show and make homemade tattoos. Using ink purchased at an arts-and-crafts store, a needle, and thread, Brunjes said, he first tattooed Jeff with a lightning bolt and a star, and about six weeks later gave him another tattoo: an inch-square swastika on Jeff’s right upper thigh.

Brunjes said he didn’t know why his friend wanted to be so marked, but he also testified that it appeared as if Jeff understood the implications. “If I ever go to jail, I’m screwed,” Brunjes said Jeff told him after he had finished the tattoo. Another friend, Alyssa Sprague, told jurors that when Jeff showed her his lightning bolt tattoo, she thought it was the Gatorade logo, but he corrected her. No, she said he told her, it was white power.
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The testimony of Angel Loja too was damaging for Jeff and difficult to listen to. His words brought the court to an even deeper than usual silence.

“I heard the blood rushing from my friend. It sounded like water from a faucet,” he said, but Keahon focused on the fact that Loja hadn’t seen the knife or his friend getting stabbed.
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Retired deputy chief medical examiner Stuart Dawson told the jury that when the knife had penetrated Lucero—“inserted all the way” to the hilt—there had been “some kind of twisting and turning.” The stab wound was just below the right collarbone, not usually a terribly dangerous place for a wound, but the knife had nicked an artery and a vein. He repeated what others had said: Quick action might have saved Marcelo’s life.
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Contradicting Loja’s testimony, Dawson appeared to say that Lucero had not been beaten repeatedly. Other than the wound that killed him, his only other injury came from Kevin Shea’s admitted punch to the mouth. Lucero’s autopsy also revealed that he had low levels of cocaine and marijuana in his body and enough alcohol to be “right at the levels of intoxication or just short of it.”
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Nicholas Hausch, the only one of the group to appear as a witness for the prosecution, painted a desolate picture of “beaner hopping.” This is how he described it: “It’s when you go out and you look for a Hispanic to beat up.” In a packed courtroom, Nick admitted that before the attack on Lucero, he and two friends had gone “beaner hopping” as well. They had punched and kicked a Hispanic man who was riding a bicycle. Nick said he took the man’s white baseball cap “as a trophy.”
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Nick also made a comment that was a setback for the prosecution. After the stabbing of Lucero, he said, he had heard someone say, “Imagine if I get away with this,” the comment that O’Donnell had attributed to Jeff. However, Nick said, it was not Jeff who uttered that remark. He didn’t know who had said it.
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The most dramatic and unexpected moment of the trial came during its fourth week when Jeff took the stand in his own defense. It was an unusual and risky move. His lawyer later told reporters that in his twenty-five years as a defense lawyer, he had put his clients on the stand fewer than ten times.
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The tactic can change the outcome of a trial. If the defendant is likable and believable, it
can sway jurors to a not-guilty verdict, but if jurors don’t believe the defendant, the results can be disastrous for the defense.

So when Jeff took the stand, his fate was in his hands. All the preparation and pretrial hearings and motions and posturing came down to the recollections and personality of a nineteen-year-old performing under the most stressful circumstance of his life.

He wore a white, open-collared shirt without a tie as he sat on the witness stand.
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His testimony began simply enough, with answers to his lawyer’s questions about his life, his age, whom he lived with, and what sports he played. Then the lawyer started asking him about the night of November 8, 2008, from his visit to Alyssa Sprague’s home to the moment when the fight with Lucero was over and, he said, Chris Overton approached him.

“And what did he say to you?” Keahon asked.

“He said, ‘Jeff, I think I just stabbed the guy in the shoulder. I really cannot get in trouble with this. Can you please take the knife? I only nicked him and I promise you he’s not hurt.’ And then, after that, I’m like, ‘Why can’t you get in trouble for this?’ He says, ‘Because I already told you that I was involved in a murder case last year and I still haven’t gotten sentenced and I’ll be screwed if I get caught. So can you please take the knife?’ And then he’s like, ‘Look back. He’s even walking away.’ I looked back and the guy was walking away.”

“Did you take the knife?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do with the knife?”

“I was holding it.”

“Did you see Nicky Hausch?”

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said, ‘What happened?’ ”

“And what did you say?”

“I told him—I’m like, ‘I stabbed the guy.’ ”

Just like that, composed and unsmiling, staring straight ahead, Jeff transferred the blame to Chris, a kid he had met the night of the killing.

When her time came, O’Donnell sounded incredulous as she asked Jeff how he could possibly take the blame for killing Lucero to protect someone he had just met.
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“I felt bad for him,” he answered.

Jeff also told her he had gone along with his friends that night because he had needed a ride for a sleepover, not because he had any intention of going “beaner-hopping.” He had never touched Lucero, whom he described as the aggressor in the confrontation, wielding his belt as a weapon against the teenagers. Lucero “could have walked away,” he said. As to his confession the night of the murder, he admitted that he had told detectives that he had stabbed Lucero. However, he explained, the detectives also wrote down things that he had never said, particularly his admission that he was part of a group that hunted down Latinos for a fight.
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As Jeff’s testimony dragged on for about three and a half hours, one could hear groans and guffaws from the packed courtroom.
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“Can you believe this kid?” someone muttered loud enough to be heard by some of the hundred people that crowded the gallery,
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among them Lucero’s mother and sister, who had flown in from Ecuador and attended the trial for the first time that day, and his brother, who was present almost every day. Doña Rosario sat as she always did, stone-faced, inscrutable in her pain. In her left hand she held a tissue, with which she dabbed at the corner of her eyes. The Suffolk County district attorney, Thomas J. Spota,
made a rare appearance. As always when he attended, he sat in the first row. A few rows behind him sat Denise Overton.

Asked afterward how she had felt when she heard the accusations against Chris, Overton told reporters, “It was horrible, absolutely horrible.”
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She said that Jeff had “no conscience whatsoever.”
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It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to blame her son for a crime.

Chris was the only one among the seven young men who attacked Lucero to have been implicated in a murder before. Jeff’s defense was not a novel one.

On May 8, 2007, exactly eighteen months before Lucero was killed, Christopher Overton had joined four other teenagers to burglarize a house in East Patchogue owned by Carlton Shaw, a thirty-eight-year-old Jamaican immigrant who worked three jobs to support his family. When Shaw confronted the burglars, one of them shot and killed him. His three-year-old boy, unharmed, was later found asleep on his chest.

Terraine Slide, then sixteen, was charged with second-degree murder. Slide’s cousin, Levon Griffin, pleaded guilty to the same charge. The other three, including Chris, were fourteen and fifteen at the time. They pleaded guilty to first-degree burglary and pointed to Slide as the killer.
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During his murder trial, Slide’s lawyer argued that the young man had been coerced into confessing guilt for a murder he did not commit. Slide, who was the only one of the defendants to be tried as an adult, blamed Chris for firing the shot that killed Shaw.
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The jurors did not believe Slide and found him guilty. However, the conviction was reversed by a state appellate court and prosecutors decided to retry him. In May 2011, Slide pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter instead of going to trial a second time. During questioning in court, Slide still maintained that Chris had brought the .22-caliber revolver used to kill Shaw.
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But this time he admitted to having fired the shot himself.
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On September 6, 2011, Justice Doyle, who had presided over
Slide’s case, sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison.
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The jurors did not believe Jeff either.

On April 19, 2010, after four days of deliberation, at 11:22 a.m., the jurors read their verdict: Jeff was acquitted of the most serious charge—second-degree murder—but he was found guilty of manslaughter as a hate crime and of gang assault in the attack on Lucero, as well as attempted assault on three other Hispanic men. The verdict meant that the jurors did not think that Jeff had intended to kill Lucero, only to cause him serious physical injury.
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Jeff heard the verdict while standing next to his lawyer.
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Keahon placed a hand on his back and felt him begin to tremble.
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When the jurors were excused, and Jeff finally sat, he bowed his head. As he was about to be handcuffed and led away by court officers, Conroy turned to face his parents and seemed to give them an encouraging look.
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His parents had sat quietly in the courtroom, but when they walked outside, Conroy began to cry, covering his face with one hand while his wife, who had attended the trial sporadically and had testified for about ten minutes on her son’s behalf, remained stone-faced.
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Lucero’s family arrived in court after the verdict was read, but in time for Joselo to praise the district attorney’s office, saying that their work had restored his faith in the American justice system.

Steve Levy, who had switched to the Republican Party to run for governor, called the attack on Lucero “a heinous, reprehensible act.” In a statement released right after the verdict, he seemed to urge the judge to deliver a tough sentence. “It is my hope that the sentence will properly reflect the brutal and blind hatred that was displayed on the night of the murder,” the statement read.
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Not everyone was content with the verdict. Allan Ramírez, the Long Island pastor who hovered protectively around the Lucero family, said that a manslaughter conviction meant “our lives are not worth very much.”
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The cameras trailed the Lucero family as they drove away from the courthouse and toward Funaro Court in Patchogue, where Lucero’s blood had once left a 370-foot-long twisting path.
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Someone had placed yellow and red tulips on the spot where Lucero bled to death. Children’s toys, including a blue plastic pool, were scattered on the pavement, along with a flattened Arizona Iced Tea can, several fans, an old computer, broken lamps, and an air-conditioning unit. Scraggly plants clung to life against a rusted metal fence. Twelve television cameras captured the scene as the family received hugs and kisses from friends and well-wishers.

In front of them all, on the sidewalk, stood Doña Rosario, who spoke of forgiveness, and her son, Joselo, who once again turned to the cameras to plead his case.

“This is the place where my brother broke the rules,” he said, referring to the often-mentioned fact that Lucero had fought back. “He defended himself. He wanted to be treated like a human.”

About Patchogue and hate crimes, Joselo appeared to have mixed but prescient feelings. At the courthouse he told reporters, “The hunting season is over, at least for now.” But later, after praying softly at the site where his brother had been killed, he seemed to reconsider. Hate, he said, “is always looking for another place.”
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