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Latino group: Beating of black man not a hate crime

BY SID CASSESE | sid.cassese@newsday.com
8:25 PM EDT, March 11, 2009

Kelvin Vargas

Kelvin Vargas (Right) and three others are accused of attacking Darryl Jackson in Roosevelt. (Photo by Howard Schnapp / March 11, 2009)

A Manhattan-based advocacy group for Latinos held a demonstration Wednesday at a Roosevelt deli to contend that the beating of a black man by a group of Hispanics on Sunday was not a hate crime.

Police have reported that some of the Hispanics hurled racial epithets at the man - Darryl Jackson, 52, of Roosevelt - as they punched, kicked and hit him with a baseball bat.

But Fernando Mateo, president of Hispanics Across America, said, "You have heard only one side of the story."

Mateo said race was not a factor in the altercation. He said that a store worker asked Jackson to stop bothering customers with his panhandling. He said the worker's son stepped in and was hit when Jackson became belligerent and threw the first punch, implying that the Hispanic group acted in self-defense.


"It's a shame that we have four people in jail for no reason whatsoever," Mateo said. "But a trial will let the truth come out."

Mateo said calling what happened a "hate crime" is an attempt to divide blacks and Hispanics. "We've always gotten along fine and will continue to do so," he saidadding, "We wish that most problems like this would result only in a fist fight, instead of going to guns and knives as so often is the case."

There were some catcalls and back and forth among the more than 50 blacks and Hispanics at the store site on Nassau Road in Roosevelt. But the really heavy arguing was between blacks supporting the Hispanics in general, although not the four who were arrested, and the blacks who said the beatings had to stop.

The former were represented most heatedly by Faye Deas, 50, who said she lives around the corner from the deli and that the Hispanics who run the store treat everybody fairly. "And I know Daryl. He's always fighting," she said.

Mateo said the store owners had gathered more than 200 signatures from black customers supporting the deli and its workers.

But one black man, who did not give his name, chastised Deas for not seeing that blacks "are getting beat up by everybody, and we aren't taking it anymore."

Mateo, a New York City activist, first made a splash on Long Island in November when he began speaking on behalf of the family of Marcelo Lucero, the Ecuadorean man killed during an alleged hate crime attack in Patchogue.

Almost immediately after Lucero's death, Mateo presented himself as the family spokesman, appearing at new conferences and regularly blasting the Suffolk officials as being biased against Hispanic people. He brought in The Guardian Angels to patrol the streets of Patchogue, a move some local critics called a publicity stunt.

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