Another Hate Crime Against a Latino in Patchogue, NY

Matthew Mont (L) and Curt Hatton (Newsday)

Last year Patchogue, New York was host to the vicious stabbing death of Marcelo Lucero, a 37 year-old immigrant from Ecuador, at the hands of 7 teenagers from the area. Today two more teens from Patchogue were arraigned on charges of assault in a separate incident that has reminded many of last year's hate crime. Curt Hatton, 19, and Matthew Mont, 16, are charged along with 20 year old Ramon Rodriguez stemming from an incident on August 14 in which the three are accused of beating an Ecuadorian man and robbing him while hurling racial epithets.

When Lucero was killed last year, it sparked a lot of controversy in the community and shone a light on the shady business of "beaner hopping," in which Patchogue youth would apparently go out looking for men of Latino descent to harass and assault for fun. When a meeting was held at the school where the teens attended (Medford-Patchogue High), things got heated when parents started to complain about the media and a Newsday reporter was forcibly removed from the auditorium. The focus should have been on how something like that could have happened in their community, not that the media was paying attention to the despicable act.

Ramon Rodriguez, the first person arrested and charged
(Newsday)

Now less than a year later we have a very similar incident, with teenagers from Medford-Patchogue High School arrested for assaulting an Ecuadorian in the same neighborhood where Marcelo Lucero was killed. In the previously cited Newsday article, some parents are quoted as saying, "This is not a racist town," or "Now my daughter's embarrassed to go to this school because people are going to incorrectly label it racist." I'm not saying that the town or school is racist, but we're less than a year after Lucero's murder, national media attention, and the beginning of a DOJ investigation and this is still happening? A similar incident happened right after Lucero's murder last year, in which 8 youths yelled racial slurs at two Latinos leaving a restaurant and pushed one of them (yes, this happened less than two weeks after Lucero's murder). After the incident last November, Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri stated, "It is very alarming that after the incident of two weeks ago [Lucero's murder] there are still people who have not gotten the message." It seems some of them still may not have gotten it.