Allegations of the mishandling of hate crime investigations within the Suffolk County Police Department are raising new concerns among immigration advocates who met with officials of the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Long Island youths accused of killing Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue in November had been attacking Hispanics in the area for a year, authorities say. “They engaged in a regular and violent pastime: hunting for Hispanics to attack,” The New York Times reported.
Five of the seven L.I. teenagers accused of hate crimes against Hispanics. (Photo: New York Times)
“In small groups with shifting members, the teens sent one Hispanic man after another to the hospital with injuries,” added Newsday. The attackers were indicted Wednesday for eight more assaults or attempted assaults on Latino men.
The teenagers, students at Patchogue-Medford High School, are accused of beating a Hispanic man unconscious in July, taking his money and shoes. In December, three of them allegedly harassed another Hispanic man, swinging a pipe at him and telling him, “You’re dead.” In June, they allegedly attacked yet another man with a knife, cutting his clothes open. Newsday quoted Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota saying,
All of the defendants participated in what we consider to be a violent and racially driven pastime. (…) the defendants called their victims such things as ‘beaners’ and ‘wetbacks.’
“These charges demonstrate there is an epidemic of hate crimes against Latinos here,” Latino Justice attorney Jose Perez told the Daily News. “The vicious murder of Mr. Lucero wasn’t a random and isolated incident.”
By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor
For the second time in less than a month, an Ecuadorean immigrant was savagely attacked in New York by men shouting anti-Hispanic slurs. Once again, as with the death a month ago of Marcelo Lucero, the pain was felt among Hispanics in the United States and in faraway South America. The attack that left José Sucuzhañay brain-dead seems to confirm the rise in hate crimes pro-immigration advocates have been warning about since Lucero’s passing.
José Sucuzhañay – Photo: Daily News
José and his brother Romel Sucuzhañay were attacked on a Brooklyn street last weekend by three men who allegedly shouted anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs while beating them with a bottle and a baseball bat. The brothers had been walking with their arms around each other.
José, 31, was declared brain-dead Tuesday at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, although his family was keeping him on life support until his parents and two children arrived from Ecuador.
“Today my brother is the victim, but tomorrow it could be your brother, your mother, your father,” another sibling, Diego Sucuzhañay, said Tuesday at a press conference outside the hospital.
According to the New York Daily News,
Diego said he had been talking with his parents in Ecuador by phone, telling them Jose “was okay.” But, he said, now “it’s time to tell them the truth.”
Thousands of miles away, Mercedes Quintuña, the Sucuzhañays’ mother, also spoke to the press.