Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

I have had enough of hate crimes. They make me so sad and mad, and must be the stupidest thing ever invented. Aren’t there enough people dying in accidents and of illnesses already? Do you really need to add more bodies to the pile just because you want to vent your anger?? Next time you are mad, how about harming yourself rather than others?

I have been thinking about hate crimes a lot ever since I heard about the case of the Ecuadorian man, Jose Sucuzhanay, who died in the hospital last Friday. He had been hit in the head with a beer bottle five days earlier and beaten with an aluminium baseball bat nearby Bushwick in Brooklyn.

It’s not clear whether the motive of the guys who attacked him was hatred towards Latinos, or towards gays, or both. Apparently they at least thought that Sucuzhanay was gay, when they saw him walking arm in arm with another man on the street. In reality that man was his brother and  Sucuzhanay was a married father of two. The brothers were on their way home from church and had stopped at a bar for some drinks. What a horrible ending for their day. I makes me want to cry, but I guess I should be a hardcore reporter who is immune to emotions.

The most recent consensus seems to be that race was indeed the more important reason for this hate crime. FBI statistics show a 40 percent increase in hate crimes against Latinos during 2003-2007, and this is already the second Latino man killed in a month’s time. The other one was Marcelo Lucero, beaten and stabbed to death in Long Island by seven teenagers, who considered it their “hobby” to mug people. This time they were looking for a “Mexican” when they found Lucero, another Ecuadorian immigrant.

Obviously Latinos are not the only victims of hate crimes, although they accounted for 60 percent of those attacked in 2007. Victims come in all colors, all do the attackers. The attackers in Sucuzhanay’s case are said to be black (although they are still at large) and in Lucero’s case they were white.

As I said earlier, hate crimes drive me mad. I understand that a multicultural society is not everyone’s cup of tea, but why don’t these people then move somewhere where they don’t have to face people of other cultures or races?? Believe it or not, there are still PLENTY of homogeneous towns on this planet where you can choose to be surrounded by only “your” people if you so wish. Do these people in Long Island or Brooklyn or wherever really think that they can get rid of EVERYONE that they don’t like in their communities?? I don’t think so.

There are always going to be people in your community that you are not going to like, or who you don’t want to get to know. That’s fine. You are not expected to like everybody anyway. But why don’t you just ignore the people you don’t like and pretend that they are not even there rather than kill them? By committing a hate crime you are ruining many people’s lives, including your own. Do you really hate these people SO much that you would rather sit in jail for the rest of your life than let them live their lives? THAT is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

Disclaimer: I feel sort of conflicted about posting this article. On one hand, it’s my cops, courts, crimes story, due today. I’m one blog short of my 13 required for Interactive. On the other hand, I worked hard on it and it’s a hilarious story. So if you can dig that, read on…

The fate of three men arrested and charged with the 2007 murder of rookie cop, Russell Timoshenko, may rest on a chicken bone. Four chicken bones, that is. Four chicken bones, some partially eaten pieces of Popeyes chicken, a biscuit, three beverages and the precise arrangement in which these items fell, when an early morning traffic stop turned deadly.

Three attorneys, each defending his own client, have not argued that their clients were elsewhere when bullets struck officer Timoshenko and his fellow rookie partner, Herman Yan who survived his wounds.  They have not argued that their clients were not in the stolen BMW X5 that was abandoned following the shooting.  They are not questioning whether a shooting took place, or whether the shooting that they agree did take place after their clients were pulled over in the early hours of July 9, resulted in the death of a New York City police officer. Instead, responding to evidence and testimony that connect each car seat with a very different role in the shooting, (the driver not shooting at all) they are battling the prosecution and each other for the least guilty seat in the car.

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