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Eileen Burke, a retired Philadelphia police officer, recounts what she saw in front of her home the night of the beating in Shenandoah.
Michael J. Mullen/Staff Photo Valerie Macdonald, owner of Caledonia Antiques in Shenandoah, talks about the borough.
From the steep heights above Shenandoah, the limits of this square-mile coal-boom settlement are defined by culm banks on one side of the valley floor and the Mrs. T's pierogie factory on the other.
Thomas O'Neill, the town's former mayor, stood on his daughter's back deck Wednesday and pointed out the landmarks: the golden dome of the nation's oldest Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, the smoking cogeneration plant on the far hill that makes electricity by burning the coal waste of the town's mining past, and a low point in the valley - the park where an illegal Mexican immigrant died last year after being beaten by members of the high school football team.
This week, the town's limits were defined once again. Four of its seven full-time police officers - including the chief - were arrested, and three were charged with covering up evidence in the beating death. Two of the football players were charged with a federal hate crime.
O'Neill, who now says he resigned in part because he could not control the police force, said the chief and some officers tried and succeeded in making their own rules of law and justice in Shenandoah.
"If they want to help somebody, they will," he said. "If they want to hurt somebody, they'll hurt them. There's nothing they could do that they couldn't get away with. That's what they thought."
'They made them heroes'
The charges this week came as no surprise to many who live here - most in town knew there was a federal investigation into the actions of the officers and the teens - but it reopened the wound that has not healed in the 17 months since the beating.
Brandon J. Piekarsky, 18, and Derrick M. Donchak, 19, were acquitted this year on the most serious charges they faced in a criminal trial, including Pennsylvania's equivalent of a hate crime, and Piekarsky was scheduled to be let out of county prison this week before his release was delayed.
Prosecutors say the criminal case was spoiled by the officers' attempts to help the teens invent a story that hid the racial motivation for the fatal beating of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala. The police allegedly encouraged the football players to get rid of the shoes they wore during the fight, falsified witness statements and urged the parents of other teens involved to accept responsibility for the assault.
Police Chief Matthew Nestor, Lt. William Moyer and Officer Jason Hayes have been charged with obstructing the investigation into the beating, while Nestor and Capt. Jamie Gennarini have been charged with extorting money from illegal gambling rings.
Residents say they witnessed or long suspected the culture of corruption, nepotism and coercion among the town's law enforcement described by federal prosecutors in indictments and at hearings this week. The police chief and his second-in-command also face federal charges of extorting payments from illegal gambling operations.
Eileen Burke, a former Philadelphia police officer who moved back to her native Shenandoah, said she saw its bleakest example firsthand. After the beating, Ramirez lay about 15 feet in front of her house at Vine and Lloyd streets. From her porch Thursday, she pointed to a manhole cover in the middle of the street where she kneeled over him as he convulsed on July 12, 2008.
A nearby utility pole once had "RIP" scrawled onto it, but it has since been painted over. Now there is only a faint orange blob to mark the spot.
"I knew there was a cover-up," Burke said. "I knew."
Police from other municipalities and state police responded to the scene before a single Shenandoah police officer arrived, she said.
"I sat on my porch that night, from when it happened at approximately 11:15, until 2:30 in the morning," Burke said. "No one came to me to ask what I saw, what I did."
It wasn't until 10 days later that Shenandoah police dropped off a paper on which she was asked to write out a witness statement, Burke said. In the months after, she said she watched the teens walk around town as if nothing wrong had happened. People coddled and protected them, she said, because they were star athletes in a town where Blue Devils football is the primary preoccupation and where the newest immigrants, Latinos who come to work on farms or in factories, are often seen as aloof and unwelcome.
"They made them heroes," Burke said. " 'Free the three.' They wanted to make shirts up and everything, because it was our illustrious football team."
When she walked around town, some people called her a "Mexican lover" or told her to "go see a Mexican," Burke said.
"I had people who said, 'Why didn't you just close the curtains?' "
'Everybody'
Shenandoah was established as a borough in 1866 and thrived with a diversity of immigrants who came to work in the coal mines. Its population has dwindled from a peak of about 30,000 to fewer than 6,000 residents today, but most people still live in the dense row homes in the town's few blocks, their homes saddled to the abandoned ones with boarded-up windows.
According to 2000 Census data, the most recent available, about 155 Hispanics live in the town, but local estimates put the number at about 500, or 10 percent of the population. They are by far the largest minority group; official counts show the next largest minority populations, Asians and blacks, each number only about 20.
The town is also older and poorer than the national average, with nearly 30 percent of the population aged 65 and older and about 20 percent of residents living below the poverty line. The annual median household income is $18,714, according to census data. The largest employer is the pierogie plant.
In his barber shop on Centre Street, Dominick Sposito unfolded a wrinkled piece of paper with a handwritten list of the bakers, barbers, billiard halls, dentists and meat markets that once shaped commerce in the square mile of Shenandoah between 1931 and 1932. According to his scrawled demographics, the population then was as high as 28,000 people, representing 22 nationalities.
"The anthracite during the Depression was the king of the kingdom," he said. "Everyone got along. It didn't matter what nationality or religion. They came to work."
Sposito's parents moved to Shenandoah from Italy, and he never left the town in which he was raised. He got his barber's license when he was 18, in 1948, and keeps it framed on the wall.
On a shelf below the handwritten prices for haircuts - $8 for men and children, $15 for "extra-long hair" - he also keeps black-and-white photographs of the Shenandoah high school football teams from 1925 and 1940. He thinks the federal indictments of Piekarsky and Donchak for hate crimes, and the prospect that they could spend their lives in prison if found guilty, are unfounded and sad, "especially if you know the families."
As a small-town barber, it is hard not to, Sposito said.
"We know them all," he said. "This is what happens in a small town. Everybody knows one another."
But the "everybody" Sposito said he knows does not include the local Latino population, which he refers to as "these people." They don't come to him to get their hair cut, he said, but they have not caused him any trouble. Sposito insists there is no racial tension in the town, or at least there wasn't until the media came again and again, trying to turn Ramirez's death into a story of hate.
"You never had that before, because we had all classes of people here," he said.
'It may be what we needed'
The hate crime charges sting in a borough that has been trying hard to rebrand itself as a living, vital community. For many citizens, Shenandoah has for too long had an overblown and undeserved reputation as the home of hard-luck, hard-drinking ruffians over the mountain from more civilized neighbors.
In recent years, the community has been trying to turn away from a period when the town was put down for being too ethnic and turn toward an embrace of its many heritages.
When Valerie Macdonald moved full-time to Shenandoah in 1998, celebrating her neighbors' ethnicities seemed a way she could help revitalize the town. A retired scientist from Brooklyn with a doctorate, Macdonald opened an antiques store on Main Street, started the historical society and began looking into how nearby towns organized Heritage Days. She held the first one in 1999.
"People to me had lost hope, a willingness to be involved, to do anything," she said. "It was the Heritage Day that brought people out."
In 2000, the celebration included the first parade of nations, now an annual event when people of every nationality dress in traditional clothing and form a contingent to march through town. There are often 18 counties represented, including Macdonald's Scotland, Poland, Puerto Rico, Israel and Mexico.
Macdonald sets the town's example of a broad embrace. She accepts that there is a gulf between the Latino and Anglo populations, but she is determined to bridge it.
"They are very insular," she said. "It's difficult to get them to come out for anything that we have or to get the Anglos to go to anything that they have."
On Thursdays, Macdonald helps a local nun teach English as a second language classes at Annunciation BVM Church, which celebrates a weekly Mass in Spanish. She attends the bilingual Rosary, where she has learned to say prayers in Spanish, and she is the only Anglo in the Spanish-language choir on Sunday.
She looked pained when asked about how she feels, in the midst of all the town's efforts to embrace multiculturalism, to have members of the community charged with a hate crime.
After a long pause, she whispered that she did not want to address it. But she added that it may be a new beginning for the town, an opportunity to get "new blood" into positions of authority and move the whole community - all its residents - forward.
"In a very unfortunate way, it may be what we needed," she said.
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96 posted comments
15 year old girl = child.
I wouldn't doubt the patriots are already planning on holding a protest, but it's probably going to be one against the double jeopardy of two American teenagers. Let the feds do what they must with the cops, presenting their evidence and allowing the jury to decide the case. The boys, however, have already been through their day in court and this is just sickening. I hope they do have a protest for them.
My only question is which of her twelve different versions did she tell this time, or did she have a whole new one?