Hunting Season (13 page)

The athletic fields, two miles from his house, became Conroy’s “church”—he shuns organized religion—and Jeff’s second home. Jeff helped load the snack stand in the evenings before games and helped maintain the fields in top form. Too old for the Pee Wee leagues, he became a mentor to many children. At sixteen, Jeff helped coach eleven-year-old football players, and he spent one summer improving a boy’s lacrosse skills because the
boy’s mother had asked him for help.

At home, Jeff mowed the lawn, did the laundry, and babysat his siblings when needed. Although sports and school kept him busy, he held some occasional jobs. Once, Pamela recalled, he worked for Wendy’s, but he was fired after two or three weeks when he was found eating chicken nuggets in the back.

“He was my back,” Conroy said. “The one who literally split the wood.”

Conroy, who dropped out of college after just one year, had once wanted to be a cop, but that dream died when he sliced the tip of his right index finger in a deli machine and realized he would never be able to pull a trigger. Later he became a manager at Kmart, but in 1997 he injured his back taking down a heavy box from a store shelf. He has not been able to return to work since, even after six back surgeries, supporting his family with his social security and disability checks. Still, he managed to take the children camping several times a year, and once a year they would splurge with a trip to Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains.

Conroy said his son was a “sweet loving kid, who never tolerated bullies” and had a 10:00 p.m. curfew most weekends. Neighbors say that he was the kind of young man who offered to mow the lawn for them and smacked their children if they cursed in front of their parents.
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But others who knew him primarily as a student say that Jeff was “obnoxious” and had absorbed his father’s displeasure toward his Latino neighbors.
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For much of Jeff’s childhood the Conroys lived across the street from a house shared by at least six Latino men, though Conroy believes there were as many as two dozen people living in the house at one time. One of them catcalled one of his daughters, who was then thirteen or fourteen; Conroy spoke to the neighbors and the whistling stopped. The episode is etched in his memory as one of the few times—perhaps the only time—he interacted with a Latino immigrant in Medford. Those who knew him then recall that Conroy was obsessed with the house and its residents
and feared that his daughters would one day be raped by the men who lived there.
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He was upset by their loud music and their backyard fires. What they were burning, he doesn’t know. Still, he said, if they didn’t bother him or his family, he “didn’t care” who his neighbors were.

Conroy’s focus was his family and coaching. Because he was surrounded by youngsters, he said, he would have heard if packs of teenagers, including his son, were roaming the streets looking for Latinos to attack. He never did. If Jeff had been carrying a knife, he would have known, he said. If his son harbored any ill feelings toward Latinos, he wasn’t aware, and he finds it impossible to believe it given that he used to think of Pamela as his future daughter-in-law and of kids named José and Juan as Jeff’s good friends.

The day before November 8, Jeff had been involved in a fight with a friend who had supposedly spread rumors that Jeff had herpes. It wasn’t his first serious fight. Three or four months before that, Jeff had been involved in another fight, at a party, but his father had not learned about it until a few days later. After that incident, Conroy had sat with his son and told him, If anything like that happens again, I’m your first call.

Jeff vividly remembered his father’s words when he was allowed to make his first call fourteen hours after he stabbed Marcelo Lucero. He grabbed the phone and told his father, Dad, I’m at the Fifth Precinct. Could you please come get me?

“Learning to hate is almost as inescapable as breathing,” note Levin and McDevitt in their book.

Like almost everyone else, the hate crime offender grows up in a culture that defines certain people as righteous, upstanding citizens, while designating others as sleazy, immoral characters who deserve to be mistreated. As a child, the perpetrator may never have had a firsthand experience with members of the groups he later comes to despise and then victimize. But,
early on, merely by conversing with his family, friends, and teachers or by watching his favorite television programs he learns the characteristics of disparaging stereotypes. He also learns that it is socially acceptable, perhaps even expected, to repeat racist jokes and use ethnic slurs and epithets.
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It is not known if Jeffrey Conroy watched Bill O’Reilly or Lou Dobbs, and his father swears that there was never any talk against Hispanics at home. But it is a fact that when Jeff started going to school in 1996, Hispanic men, mostly Mexican, had begun to congregate around the 7-Eleven in Farmingville, not far from his house. By the time he got to high school, in the fall of 2005, Steve Levy had been elected Suffolk County executive.

Were Conroy and his friends paying attention? Perhaps not consciously, but even overhearing the anti-immigrant rhetoric that was prevalent in Suffolk County then, and indeed in the entire country, would have had an impact on them. “Young Americans are frequently targeted as the primary audience for the culture of hate, especially its films, music, and humor,” observe Levin and McDevitt. “Partially because they lack diverse personal experiences, young people are generally unprepared to reject prejudiced claims coming from sources they regard as credible.”
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Conroy once told a filmmaker that there “was more negativity coming out” of Levy’s mouth in the newspapers his son took to the bathroom to read every morning than in anything that his family had ever said regarding immigrants.
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Prejudiced feelings were a fact of life in the local high school in Medford, the same school that the young men from the so-called Patchogue 7 attended. In 2008, there were three thousand registered students in Patchogue-Medford High School, including four hundred self-described Hispanics.
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Clarissa Espinoza, Julio Espinoza’s youngest child, was one of them; she was a sophomore in the fall of 2008. Born in Patchogue, Clarissa is perfectly bilingual and bicultural. With her fair skin and flawless accent, she blended with the general population of
the school and doesn’t remember being the target of discrimination, but that does not mean she was blind to it.

“I didn’t like high school,” she says softly. “There was racism everywhere. The school was very divided.”
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The division was stark and visible even to casual observers. Students who were learning English, mostly Hispanics, were placed in ESL classes, as mandated by the state. English-as-a-second-language classes are meant to teach English to newcomers, but in a school setting they can also create a barrier between native speakers and foreigners. In less politically charged circumstances, such a program can make a school more inclusive and international. This was not the case in Patchogue-Medford High School, where all four ESL classes were contained in one hallway with twelve classrooms. There was little interaction between ESL students and the rest of the school, and when there was, it wasn’t productive or positive.

A few days before the end of the school year in 2009, the year Jeff and most of his friends would have graduated, two students from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University—Tamara Bock and Angel Canales—conducted a series of interviews with Patchogue-Medford High School students for a documentary,
Running Wild: Hate and Immigration on Long Island.
The documentary aired on PBS; the transcript of their original interviews paints a dismal picture of high school life there.

A boy named David, sixteen and born in El Salvador, narrates how “the other people,” the white, non-Hispanic kids, would throw food at the Latino students who huddled together at their own tables during lunchtime. “Like they would say that we immigrants [should] go back to Mexico,” David recalled.

“And what do you do?” one of the filmmakers inquired.

“Nothing. Most of the time we remain quiet,” David replied.

“So, when you are eating and someone shouts ‘Go back to Mexico,’ what goes through your head? What do you think and how do you feel?”

“I feel very [long pause] ashamed because we are in a country that is not ours, you know.”

“Has there ever been a moment when someone has said something demeaning to you in the school hallways? And have you had a problem with someone who dislikes immigrant students here in school?”

“Yes, sometimes we are walking and they come by and push us with their arm and we can’t do anything because, you know, we don’t want to get in trouble with them,” David said.

Students on their way to the gym would mumble under their breath, “You Mexican, go back to your country,” whether the student was Mexican or not. Or, they’d yell, “Talk English!” and rush off to class. Other times, they would threaten the Latino students, saying that, if they complained, they’d call “la migra,” immigration authorities. The list of insults was long, another student said. “You hear ‘spic.’ You hear ‘Mexican.’ You hear ‘dumb-in-a-can’ [for Dominican]. You hear ‘beaner.’ ‘Border hopper.’ There is a lot. The list can go forever. You hear ‘alien,’ ‘illegal,’ or ‘II’ for ‘illegal immigrant.’ ”

Another teen, a boy named William, said, “You can’t walk in the hallway without looking back.” Angelica, seventeen, who was born in New York City but moved to Patchogue when she was nine, said she had heard “nasty comments” about Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. This is how she analyzed the behavior of some of her classmates:

I don’t think that they’re racist or anything. Like, I think it’s what they hear at home. Like when you’re hearing stuff on the news saying that, oh, like, Mexicans are crossing the border and Hispanics are coming over here and they’re trying to take over our jobs. I think it’s their parents telling them all this stuff and it gets implanted and embedded in their head. So they come to school with this hatred towards Hispanics, when, like, they’re not the only immigrants coming to this
country. But, like, I think the kids, they hear it at home, and then they come over here and they think they know everything but they are really ignorant.

She went on: “Everywhere. It’s everywhere. If you walk down Patchogue on Main Street, you hear people in the street. If a Hispanic man is riding his bicycle or something down Main Street, you hear people, like, making nasty comments. Always, everywhere.”

One teacher who spoke to the filmmakers, Craig Kelskey, a physical education instructor who had been working at the high school for thirty years, said the school was a reflection of the community. “Whatever problems are going on in the community, those problems get brought into the school,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure that there’s things said to certain kids during the course of the school day and of course you would be scared. I think that is only human nature.”

The resentment toward Hispanics was fueled, in part, by the mistaken assumption that the Patchogue-Medford School District had had to cut sports programs in the high school to pay for ESL classes. About five hundred of the district’s eighty-five-hundred-plus students were taking ESL classes then. They hailed from forty-three countries, two-thirds of which were Spanish speaking.
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Parents and students alike thought the trade-off unfair, even if there never was any such trade-off. High school sports were sacrosanct and school board members always instructed the school superintendent, Michael Mostow, to “figure out” how to continue the program, even when there was no money left in the budget, even if they had to use old equipment. He did, taking money from here and there to keep all sports afloat and the voters happy.
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Still, even if sports were not sacrificed, the animosity continued. Why should the taxpayers pay for the education of the children of “illegals”? many asked openly.

Community blogs were replete with anti-immigrant commentary,
some thoughtful; some virulent. “Not my problem if ESL classes are crowded, hard to get to or there’s not enough of them or because of budget cuts. My tax money shouldn’t be funding these programs to begin with!! If I go to Mexico are they going to pay for and send me to classes to learn Spanish? Don’t think so.” So read a message posted on Medfordcommunity-watch.com in November 2008 and signed by “Dana.” Another post read, “The problem is on the Federal level of government with their failure to take control of the immigration problem. . . . Americans are tired of paying the way for people who don’t belong here and our sense of fairness is being pushed to the limit. I believe this anger would exist against any nationality that would take advantage of us in this manner. If the governments of these other countries aren’t taking care of there
[sic]
own people why should we be expected to foot the bill for their care?” This one was signed “DG.”

Even earlier, in a 2005 Long Island political forum, someone signing herself or himself
“PM REALIST”
wrote:
“WHY DIDN’T THEY CUT THE ESL CLASSES? LET THESE KIDS LEARN ENGLISH LIKE OUR FOREFATHERS AND MOTHERS!!!”
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In many ways, the school was a microcosm of what was happening in the community. The district went from 4 percent to 24 percent Latino in five years. Three of the seven elementary schools in the district were 50 percent Latino in 2008.
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A week before Jeffrey Conroy and his friends set out to hunt “beaners” in Patchogue, a swastika and some anti-black comments were found scrawled in a stairwell at the school, the same week that Barack Obama was elected the first black president of the United States.