Hunting Season : Immigration and Murder in an All-american Town (9780807001820) by Ojito Mirta

Author:Ojito, Mirta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital Dist

CHAPTER 8

A TORN COMMUNITY

Mayor Paul Pontieri was reading the paper in his backyard when he received the call at about 10:30 a.m. It was a fine Sunday morning. Yellow and red leaves from nearby maple trees fluttered in the breeze. The sun was peeking from behind the clouds, and the temperature hovered around fifty degrees. As had been his habit for the last thirty years, Pontieri had already gone to seven thirty Mass at St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic church on Ocean Avenue. Afterward, as was also his habit, he had bought some knot rolls, Italian bread, and coffee, and had visited his mother and one of his sisters, who lived nearby. They had coffee and a quick chat.1

He went home after that, expecting to have a relaxing day. His children were grown, his wife, a busy woman who worked for the Southampton school district, always had things to do, and there was nothing on his mayoral agenda for that day. The elections were over—just five days earlier, 53 percent of the county had voted for Obama—and Pontieri himself had been easily reelected since he had run unopposed. All that awaited him this morning of November 9 was the paper and more coffee. Then the phone call changed the course of his day and, as he would soon find, the course of his mayoralty.

There has been a death in the street, someone from the county executive’s office told him. The news startled Pontieri because there had been no murders in the village since he had been elected in 2004. He could recall one or perhaps two murders over the prior twenty-five years.2

Pontieri hung up and set to work. Not having dealt with a murder before, he did what any citizen would do: he called the police. The dispatcher told him that there had been a fight and some kids had been arrested. That was all he knew. After the call, Pontieri tried to go back to the paper but couldn’t concentrate. Restless and unhappy with the scant information he had gathered, he drove to the police station, about five minutes from his house, and spoke with a detective, who gave him a very brief description of what had happened and told him he would know more once they were done with the investigation. Some of the young men involved had not yet been interviewed.

One thing was clear, the detective told him: six of the seven alleged perpetrators were white, and the victim was a Latino man who lived in Patchogue, a few blocks from the house where Pontieri had grown up and where his mother still lived. Not one of the young men under investigation for the killing lived in the village, but they lived nearby, close enough so that Pontieri was sure that people he knew were bound to know who they were or at least know their parents. Close enough so that some kids in the village surely had played baseball or football with at least one of the attackers.

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