With six other Long Island teens facing lesser charges, Jeffrey Conroy is accused in the brutal hate crime stabbing of Marcelo Luero, but his friend Will Garcia—an acquaintance of the victim—is on his side. In recent weeks prosecutors have pointed to Conroy's prison-style Swastika tattoo as an indicator of his racist ideology, but Garcia, who like Lucero is from Ecuador, told the Times, “How’s he going to be a white supremacist if he chills with Spanish people and he chills with black people? He’s my friend. He’s been there for me. I’ve been there for him. He wasn’t a racist.”
Six months before 37-year-old Lucero's stabbing, Garcia and Conroy lifted weights together "just laughing, talking, joking around," according to the now-18-year-old immigrant. Unlike other kids at their school, he says, Conroy—whom he met in Freshman year Spanish class—never targeted him because of his race. He recalls having been spat on and having peers "bump into you and then say, ‘Oh, you Mexican,’ ‘you beaner,'...Jeff was never like that. He’s never said anything disrespectful to me.” As for the Hispanic hunting "beaner hopping" practice that Conroy and his co-defendants allegedly engaged in, Garcia points out they didn't invent it. “I’ve heard that word since fifth grade,” said Garcia, though never from Conroy, he claims.
The teen is standing trial for second-degree murder as a hate crime in Lucero's case and for gang assault in the beatings of three other Hispanic men. Recently a friend who's pleaded guilty to lesser charges testified against him, alleging that Conroy told him he'd stabbed Lucero and bragged, "Imagine if I get away with this." Garcia hasn't appeared at the trial and says he's "trying to stay away" from it. According to Rev. Allan Ramirez, an Ecuadorean advocate helping the victim's family, "The fact that [Conroy] had an Ecuadorean friend could be seen simply as a way of hiding his hatred for Latinos. What better way to hide his racism.”
