An all-white jury on Friday acquitted two Pennsylvania teenagers of all serious charges against them stemming from the fatal beating of an illegal Mexican immigrant last summer. A representative for the victim’s family called the result an outrage.
Brandon Piekarsky, 17, was acquitted of third-degree murder and ethnic intimidation, while Derrick Donchak, 19, was acquitted of aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation. Both were convicted of simple assault.
The defendants hugged each other after the verdicts were read, and friends and family members clapped and cheered, leading to a rebuke from the judge and sheriff’s deputies.
Ramirez’s family assailed the verdict, Gladys Limon said.
“There’s been a complete failure of justice,” said Limon, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, who attended the trial and informed Ramirez’s family in Mexico of the verdict. “It’s just outrageous and very difficult to understand how any juror could have had reasonable doubt.”
She said the evidence “clearly established that Luis Ramirez was brutally beaten.”
After four days of often conflicting testimony, jurors were left to sort out the facts of an epithet-filled brawl that pitted popular football players against a 25-year-old Hispanic man who appeared willing to fight.
Prosecutors cast Ramirez as the victim of a gang of drunken white teens motivated by their dislike of their small coal town’s burgeoning Hispanic population. But the jury evidently sided with defense attorneys who called Ramirez the aggressor and characterized the brawl as a street fight that ended tragically.
Jury foreman Eric Macklin said the vote wasn’t even close. But he said: “I feel bad for Luis’ friends and family. I know they feel they haven’t gotten justice.”
Frederick Fanelli, Piekarsky’s attorney, said he was “absolutely thrilled” with the verdict.
“This has been a long, long hard-fought case, highly charged obviously with all the media,” he said. “It just couldn’t be a better ending for us.”
Schuylkill County District Attorney James Goodman said he was disappointed with the outcome.
“It was a very difficult case for a number of reasons. We presented the best case we could. We would have liked a better result,” he said.
Goodman said there were “many problems with the evidence,” but declined to go into specifics.
The case exposed ethnic tensions in Shenandoah, a blue-collar town of 5,000 that has lured Hispanic residents drawn by cheap housing and jobs in nearby factories and farm fields. Ramirez moved to the town about seven years ago from Iramuco, Mexico, working in a factory and picking strawberries and cherries.
Displaying a candid photo of Ramirez, Schuylkill County Assistant District Attorney Robert Franz told jurors on Friday: “He was assaulted and he was beaten, and he was killed for walking the streets of Shenandoah. He didn’t deserve that.”
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