PATCHOGUE, N.Y. — Hundreds stood in the rain next to the railroad tracks, around a shrine made of flowers, balloons and a mural of the man who had been killed there. Someone arranged purple and white votive candles into the shape of a heart.
It was Nov. 14, 2008, six days after the man, a 37-year-old immigrant named Marcelo Lucero, was stabbed in the chest in what the authorities said was a racially motivated attack by a group of seven Long Island teenagers, most of them white.
One of the mourners at the vigil was Will Garcia, who was 17. Mr. Garcia, like Mr. Lucero, was originally from Ecuador.
Mr. Lucero was from Gualaceo, in Azuay Province; Mr. Garcia was born in Cuenca, a short drive away. Both had come to the United States and ended up in the same small place, the Suffolk County village of Patchogue, population 12,194. Mr. Garcia’s family knew Mr. Lucero’s family. Mr. Garcia and Mr. Lucero worked out at the same gym here, and the two would often say hello to each other.
And yet Mr. Garcia had an even more personal connection to the attack, which he kept to himself the night of the vigil.
He is a friend of Jeffrey Conroy, the teenager accused of stabbing and killing Mr. Lucero as part of a hate crime. Both teenagers were students at Patchogue-Medford High School in the class of 2009.
Mr. Garcia recalled, for example, that six months before the stabbing, Mr. Conroy sat on Mr. Garcia’s porch with a few other boys, wishing him a happy birthday and working out with weights. “Just laughing, talking, joking around,” Mr. Garcia said.
Mr. Lucero’s death and its aftermath have been one of the most divisive episodes on Long Island in recent memory. The stabbing revealed tensions between whites and Hispanics in Suffolk County, prompted many Latinos to come forward claiming they were frequent targets of harassment and assaults, and raised questions about the county Police Department’s response to reports of crimes against Latinos.
Caught in the middle of all this has been Mr. Garcia, who lives within blocks of where Mr. Lucero was stabbed in a parking lot of the Long Island Rail Road train station here.
“It’s crazy,” said Mr. Garcia, now 18. “This is like something you would see in a movie. You just can’t believe it’s real life.”
Mr. Garcia has his feet in two worlds seemingly at odds with each other: He continues to support Mr. Conroy’s claim of innocence and says he believes that his friend has been falsely branded a white supremacist, and yet he also supports the views of many in the Hispanic community that the attack was but one example of the racial and ethnic hatred they face on a daily basis.
He said that both he and his father had been spit on by white youths, and that a few weeks ago, as his 14-year-old brother was riding a skateboard outside their apartment, an older white man in a yellow car slowed down, laughed and shouted that Mexicans don’t skateboard.
“I chased the car,” Mr. Garcia said. “I was so mad. There’s a lot of racism going on around here.”
He has stayed in touch with Mr. Conroy’s friends and relatives as Mr. Conroy’s hate-crime trial proceeds in State Supreme Court in nearby Riverhead, yet Mr. Garcia also met Mr. Lucero’s brother, Joselo, after he spoke at a local church.
Mr. Garcia attended a second vigil at the train station last year to commemorate the anniversary of Mr. Lucero’s death, and he volunteered at a soccer tournament promoting diversity.
Yet he also describes Mr. Conroy as one of his closest friends.
“How’s he going to be a white supremacist if he chills with Spanish people and he chills with black people?” Mr. Garcia said. “He’s my friend. He’s been there for me. I’ve been there for him. He wasn’t a racist.”
Mr. Garcia said that he was not there that November night, and that only the seven young men who were know what really happened in the parking lot.
What he does know, Mr. Garcia said, is that Mr. Conroy, whom he has known for nearly six years and befriended after they met in Spanish class freshman year, never said anything anti-Hispanic to him.
Other boys at the school did.
“There would be kids, and you would walk and they would bump into you and then say, ‘Oh, you Mexican,’ ‘you beaner,’ ” Mr. Garcia said. “Jeff was never like that. He’s never said anything disrespectful to me.”
Mr. Conroy, now 19, faces several charges in connection with Mr. Lucero’s stabbing and attempted attacks on three other Hispanic men, including second-degree murder as a hate crime and gang assault. In recent days, the prosecution has been calling witnesses to testify in the trial, which is being heard by 12 jurors and 4 alternates in Justice Robert W. Doyle’s courtroom.
Prosecutors have said Mr. Conroy and six other Patchogue-Medford High School students attacked Mr. Lucero and a friend shortly before midnight on Nov. 8, 2008, part of a series of assaults singling out Hispanic men.
A Suffolk County police officer who patted down Mr. Conroy that night and found a knife on him testified that Mr. Conroy told him, “I stabbed him.”
Bloodstains on the blade of the knife matched Mr. Lucero’s DNA.
The Rev. Allan B. Ramirez, the Ecuadorean pastor of Brookville Reformed Church and an immigrant advocate helping the Lucero family, said the fact that Mr. Conroy had an Ecuadorean friend illustrated the complexities of the racial dynamics in this case, but did not change his opinion about Mr. Conroy’s guilt.
“There are a lot of racist people out there who live quote-unquote everyday, normal lives,” he said. “They’re not going to walk around saying 24 hours a day, ‘I’m a racist.’ The fact that he had an Ecuadorean friend could be seen simply as a way of hiding his hatred for Latinos. What better way to hide his racism.”
The authorities said the seven teenagers hunted for Hispanic men to attack, as part of an activity they referred to as “beaner-hopping,” a practice that incited outrage and helped thrust Mr. Lucero’s stabbing into the spotlight.
If the seven defendants went “beaner-hopping” that night, as prosecutors allege, they were not the first to do so, and they invented neither the term nor the crime. Mr. Garcia and other former students at the high school said they had heard of students boasting of going “beaner-hopping” for years before November 2008. “I’ve heard that word since fifth grade,” said Mr. Garcia, who added that he never heard Mr. Conroy use it.
Though he has occasionally spoken to others of their friendship, he has largely kept his connection to Mr. Conroy to himself and has not attended the trial, as several other of Mr. Conroy’s young friends have. “I’m just trying to stay away from everything,” Mr. Garcia said.
Mr. Garcia graduated from the high school and now works two jobs: he washes dishes at a restaurant and does maintenance at a church. He said he was trying to save money to go to Suffolk County Community College.
One recent afternoon, Mr. Garcia walked through the parking lot, to the long driveway where Mr. Lucero was found by the police that night. Wrapped around the top of the chain-link fence at the entrance of the driveway was a rosary with a small plastic cross on it.