Not a good thing for baseball

The New York Times has an article by Ian Urbina about anti-immigrant trouble in Pennsylvania:

Ten days ago, shortly after two white teenagers were acquitted of the most serious charges in the beating death of Luís Ramírez, a Mexican immigrant, several white students at the local high school told Felix Bermejo that he would be the next person to get a beating, he says. Last Sunday, Eileen Burke, a former Philadelphia police officer who found Mr. Ramírez unconscious on the ground outside her Lloyd Street home after he was beaten, found that her car had been egged after she was quoted in a local newspaper saying she believed that the police had mishandled the investigation.
Last week, a fight broke out between a group of white teenagers and a group of black and Latino teenagers and someone pulled out a gun, an escalation that several onlookers said never would have happened before. The trial stemming from Mr. Ramírez’s death ended nearly two weeks ago, but tensions continue to boil in this small Pennsylvania coal town of 5,100 northwest of Philadelphia, where Mexicans and other Latinos have been settling in search of affordable housing and work in the mines or apple and peach farms.
“It’s only gotten worse since the verdict,” said a white woman at a downtown store who asked that her name not be used because she was afraid of how her neighbors might react to her having talked to a reporter. “The whole thing has set us backwards, and if the trial had swung the other way, it would have just been the whites who were angry.”
Closure in the matter is not likely to come soon. A federal investigation of the crime and the police’s handling of it is under way. The case has also become something of a cause célèbre for national Hispanic organizations, including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or Maldef, which has begun a national petition calling for the Justice Department to bring federal hate crime charges against the assailants and has called for the Senate to pass legislation strengthening the federal hate crime law. Similar legislation was passed by the House last month.
“This case is not just about what happened to Luís; it’s about what Latinos nationally are facing,” said John Amaya, a staff lawyer with Maldef, who added that Mr. Ramírez’s death was part of a larger trend of violence against Latinos. He pointed to federal crime statistics that show a forty percent increase in attacks on Hispanics from 2003 to 2007.
And while many white residents said there were no racial tensions locally except those being sparked by news coverage and claims from out-of-town civil rights groups, Latinos offered a different view. “This town is a place where people can be very kind, but there are also a lot of folks who don’t like change and they don’t like people who are different, and they make sure you know it,” said Fermin Bermejo, 44, Felix’s father. Mr. Bermejo, who is Puerto Rican and proudly flies a Puerto Rican flag just beneath an American one at his house, moved here from the South Bronx seventeen years ago. He said that his son was being bullied at school by several white students and that he repeatedly reported the problem to school officials, who said there was little they could do. Finally, he told his son to go ahead and respond to the boys with violence, and his son was suspended shortly thereafter. “All we were asking the principal to do,” Mr. Bermejo said, “is talk to the bullies and tell them that if the accusations were true, they would be in serious trouble.”
Downtown, at the local Hispanic bodega and the town’s main Mexican restaurant, patrons did not want their names used, but seemed eager to tell their stories. One Mexican woman described how people yelled at them if they spoke Spanish in public. Another said that since the trial, more people in passing cars seemed to yell things at her as she walked home from work. All of them added that most people in town did not act that way, but that there were enough exceptions to make them fearful. “We have to walk very carefully in this town,” said Lupe Silva, who owns a secondhand store downtown and is Mr. Ramírez’s cousin. He said his shop window was shattered by vandals two months ago.
Thomas O’Neill, the former mayor of Shenandoah, who resigned for personal reasons last year, said, “The whole situation was a shock to me, honestly. I was skeptical of the claim that there were racial tensions in town,” he said, “but then the details started coming out and people started speaking up. I was shocked by what they were saying.” The current mayor, Michael Whitecavage, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Mr. Ramírez, an illegal immigrant and a 25-year-old farmhand and factory worker, was beaten on 12 July 2008, the authorities say, in a fight that started after several football players from the local high school who had been drinking made remarks to the fifteen-year-old girl walking with him. The authorities say the teenagers yelled ethnic slurs as they punched and kicked Mr. Ramírez, who died from the injuries two days later in the hospital.
On 1 May, an all-white jury acquitted Brandon Piekarsky, 17, of third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation and Derrick Donchak, 19, of aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation. Both were convicted of simple assault, a misdemeanor.
Another defendant, Colin Walsh, pleaded guilty to a federal civil-rights charge before trial and testified, admitting that he threw a punch that knocked Mr. Ramírez unconscious. Brian Scully, 18, also a defendant, is charged in juvenile court with aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation.
“When people get in fights, they say whatever comes to mind, but I don’t think that makes it a hate crime,” said Daniel Adacavage, who is white and the manager of the Chuplis Apartments, not far from where the beating took place.
Echoing this opinion, Ed Rolko described the death as a “street fight gone awry". Mr. Rolko, who is white, owns Mr. Edward’s Styling Salon, a barbershop whose front door sits in the shadow of a large banner honoring the 2006 District XI Class A championship by the football team at Shenandoah Valley High School, where most of the defendants played. “This is a tight-knit place, and everyone knows each other,” said Mr. Rolko, adding that he, like everyone else in town, knows the defendants personally. Asked whether he knew Mr. Ramírez, Mr. Rolko said no.

Rico says whatever the problem, this isn't the solution...