A suspect in a Long Island hate crime got a prison-style Swastika tattoo after watching the HBO series Oz, according to court testimony. “I didn’t ask about it,” said Keith Brunjes, the 18-year-old who administered it with ink, a needle and thread. “He wanted it.” His "best friend" Jeffrey Conroy is the first of seven teens to go on trial for the fatal stabbing of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero in late 2008. The group is thought to have routinely terrorized Hispanics for sport in a practice dubbed "beaner hopping."
Conroy pleaded guilty to second degree murder as a hate crime, among other things. The AP reports how another witness, 17-year-old Alyssa Sprague, told the court he'd identified his lighting bolt tattoo, which she thought was the Gatorade logo, as a symbol for "white power." But his father claims he didn't know about the antisemitic branding: “I was so mad when I found out that he had this,” Robert Conroy said, according to the Times. “He doesn’t wear it proudly. It was just kids being stupid.” Echoing his sentiments, the teen's lawyer said his client isn't racist and claimed the tattoos were nothing more than the work of “two young kids acting like jerks.”
Also on Tuesday, another of the crew's alleged victims took the stand. Hector Sierra said that he was attacked by a group of young men 15 minutes before Lucero was stabbed to death and almost didn't alert the authorities, since co-workers who'd also been victimized told him "nothing ever happened."
