The only Hispanic defendant among seven high school friends accused in the fatal attack on an Ecuadorean immigrant pleaded guilty Wednesday to gang assault as a hate crime.
Jose Pacheco, the son of a black mother and a Puerto Rican father, is the second defendant to plead guilty as part of a deal with prosecutors that requires him to testify against his alleged cohorts.
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They are accused in the midnight attack of dry-cleaning worker Marcelo Lucero, who was stabbed in the chest Nov. 8, 2008, near the Patchogue train station. The case has brought a national spotlight on the area’s race relations; prosecutors contend Lucero’s death was the culmination of an ongoing campaign by the Long Island teenagers that targeted Hispanic immigrants for violence.
Only one of the teens is accused of murder, while the remaining four defendants face assault and other charges; all are white and have pleaded not guilty.
Pacheco, 18, also pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to three counts of attempted assault as a hate crime. He faces 5 to 25 years behind bars on gang assault, the top count. In November, defendant Nicholas Hausch pleaded guilty to conspiracy and hate crime charges and agreed to testify against the others.
Both Pacheco and Hausch admitted participating in other attacks on Hispanics, confessing they and their accomplices frequently used racial epithets when confronting victims. In one attack, Hausch said, they shot a BB gun at a Hispanic man. Pacheco said one of his co-defendants gave him a knife hours before Lucero was killed, but prosecutors say it was not used against Lucero.
“It confounds me,” Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota said of Pacheco’s involvement in attacks on Hispanics. The prosecutor said Pacheco’s comments in a newspaper interview last month that he was an unwilling participant who caught a ride home with the wrong crowd were particularly galling.
“He was one of the ringleaders,” Spota said. “I can’t understand why or how he could possibly do this. But the fact of the matter is, and it has been made clear today, that he had every intention of going forward, and he had done it on prior dates.”
Defense attorney Christopher Bracato said his client may have been influenced by what his friends were doing. “He didn’t go out that night thinking this is how it would end,” the lawyer said. “I don’t think they realized the gravity of what they were doing. And certainly no one expected a knife to come out and for someone to die.”
Lucero, 37, came to the United States when he was 21. He was walking with a friend when they were confronted by a mob of teens. His friend fled, but Lucero was surrounded, prosecutors say. He tried to fight back, flailing at the assailants with his belt. At some point, an 18-year-old plunged a knife into Lucero’s chest before running away, prosecutors said.
Lucero’s brother and sister, Joselo and Isabel, arrived at the Suffolk County courthouse moments before Pacheco admitted his role in the attack.
“This is unspeakable,” Joselo Lucero said in broken English. “I don’t understand how you can attack someone of your own kind. Just because you were born here doesn’t make you no better than nobody.”
Suffolk County has seen thousands of Hispanics settle there in recent years. U.S. Census figures show the number of Hispanics has nearly doubled, from 7.1 percent of the population in 1990 to 13.7 percent in 2008.
The Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report in September titled “Climate of Fear; Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County,” cataloguing a litany of anti-immigrant attacks dating back a decade.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
