Nice bunch of kids, really

Manny Fernandez has an article in The New York Times about more mindless kids:

In a packed Long Island courtroom, a prosecutor laid out in chilling detail the “sport” that she said the defendant and his friends had made out of attacking Hispanic men. “On 8 November 2008, the hunt was on,” Megan O’Donnell, the prosecutor, told 12 jurors and 4 alternates in State Supreme Court on Thursday.
The defendant, Jeffrey Conroy, 19, was one of seven Patchogue-Medford High School students who the police and prosecutors said attacked an Ecuadorean immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, in November 2008. The fatal stabbing of Mr. Lucero shocked many on Long Island and focused new attention on assaults and harassment of Latinos in the area.
In her opening statement, Ms. O’Donnell described how the teenagers, including Mr. Conroy, roamed the village of Patchogue that Saturday evening for one purpose: to find a Hispanic person to assault. “They were not in Patchogue looking to go to a party,” said Ms. O’Donnell, an assistant district attorney in Suffolk County. They were, instead, “looking for blood— specifically, Mexican blood.” They called the sport Mexican-hopping or beaner-hopping, she said. Ms. O’Donnell told the jurors that Mr. Conroy expressed his feelings of white supremacy, both in the tattoos on his body and in the statements that he made to others, and that he made Hispanics targets because of their ethnicity and because he “felt these people were easy targets” who were unlikely to call the police. That night, the group hopped into a sport utility vehicle belonging to one of the teenagers, after drinking beer with a larger group at the Medford train station, she said. Earlier that day, two of the teenagers shot a BB gun at another Latino man, Marlon Garcia.
Later that evening, the boys, unable to find potential victims in Medford, drove to Patchogue and went after Hector Sierra, who managed to escape. Prosecutors have charged some or all of the teenagers with attacking or trying to attack a total of six Hispanic men, including Mr. Lucero, Mr. Garcia, and Mr. Sierra.
When they spotted Mr. Lucero walking with a friend near the train station in Patchogue, they surrounded him, she said. Some of the teens chased the friend, Angel Loja, while Mr. Lucero took off his denim jacket and started swinging his belt.
The belt struck Mr. Conroy in the head. Mr. Conroy, she said, took out his knife and thrust it into Mr. Lucero’s upper right chest. The teenagers fled, and Mr. Conroy rinsed the blood off the knife in a puddle of rainwater, shortly before police officers stopped the group and discovered the knife on Mr. Conroy, she said. She added that Mr. Conroy admitted to the police at the time that he had stabbed Mr. Lucero. “There is one cause for the death of Marcelo Lucero, one cause, and that is the defendant,” she told the jury.
Mr. Conroy is facing second-degree murder as a hate crime, gang assault, and other charges. He is the first person to stand trial for murder as a hate crime on Long Island since the state’s hate-crime law was enacted in 2000. Mr. Conroy has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Many of the seats in the front of the courtroom were filled with relatives and friends of Mr. Conroy’s, including his father, Robert Conroy, 49, whom Mr. Conroy nodded to as he was led in handcuffs to his seat. Mr. Lucero’s brother, Joselo Lucero, sat toward the back of the courtroom.
In his opening statement, Mr. Conroy’s lawyer, William Keahon, said Ms. O’Donnell’s statements “are not fact. They are not proven.” Mr. Keahon did not discuss the specifics of that November evening, but focused most of his comments on reminding the jurors of a defendant’s presumption of innocence and other legal principles. He said that, in November 2008, Mr. Conroy appeared in the same courthouse and told the judge that he was not guilty. “Those were his words then, and those are his words today,” Mr. Keahon said.
One issue that will play a role in Mr. Conroy’s defense is the 39 minutes that elapsed from the time of the initial 911 call to when Mr. Lucero arrived at the hospital, which was only three miles from the scene. The 911 call of a man stabbed came in at 11:55 p.m., and Mr. Lucero arrived at the hospital at 12:34 a.m.
The trial’s first witness, Chris Schiera, an assistant chief with the volunteer Patchogue Ambulance Company, said they received the call at 12:01 a.m. Mr. Schiera said they spent thirteen minutes at the scene, and then left at 12:25 a.m. to take Mr. Lucero to a nearby landing zone to be airlifted to Stony Brook University Medical Center. When Mr. Lucero began going into cardiac arrest and they began performing CPR on him at 12:26 a.m., they took him instead to Brookhaven, Mr. Schiera said.
He said they stopped on the way at 12:30 a.m. to pick up a paramedic with the Holbrook Fire Department, because the paramedic was “trained to a higher level of certification”. Mr. Schiera said that his EMT certification had lapsed at the time, preventing him from giving a patient an IV. Under cross-examination, Mr. Schiera said Mr. Lucero, at the scene, was in shock from blood loss. “There was nobody on scene who was actually qualified to administer an IV to Mr. Lucero,” he said.
Ms. O’Donnell said jurors would hear some “embarrassing details” during the trial. A toxicology report from the county medical examiner’s office showed that Mr. Lucero had cocaine, marijuana and alcohol in his system when he died. He had a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent, the legal limit that qualifies as being intoxicated while driving. Mr. Lucero’s brother, Joselo, said in an earlier interview on Wednesday that he did not know if his brother had a drug problem. “Whatever they say my brother has done, or not, doesn’t give them the right to kill him,” he said.

Rico says he doesn't think that incompetence by the paramedics is gonna provide much in the way of mitigating circumstances for stabbing someone...