Another Anti-Immigrant Attack Ends in Tragedy

First Luis Ramirez.

Then Marcelo Lucero.

Now Jose Sucuzhanay.

There's been another fatal attack on a Latin@ in the Northeast, and evidence that the killing was motivated by the race of the victim.

"Latino."  "Immigrant."  "Illegal."  "Mexican."  "Beaner."  I don't know what the attackers yelled at Sucuzhanay as they beat him into a coma with a metal bat, but it was probably worse than what I've written here.

This attack also may have been triggered by the perceived sexual orientation of the victim.

The two brothers from Ecuador had attended a church party and had stopped at a bar afterward. They may have been a bit tipsy as they walked home in the dead of night, arm-in-arm, leaning close to each other, a common tableau of men in Latino cultures, but one easily misinterpreted by the biased mind.

Suddenly a car drew up. It was 3:30 a.m. Sunday, and the intersection of Bushwick Avenue and Kossuth Place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a half-block from the brothers' apartment, was nearly deserted - but not quite. Witnesses, the police said, heard some of what happened next.

Three men came out of the car shouting at the brothers, Jose and Romel Sucuzhanay - something ugly, anti-gay and anti-Latino. Vulgarisms against Hispanics and gay men were heard by witnesses, the police said. One man approached Jose Sucuzhanay, 31, the owner of a real estate agency who has been in New York a decade, and broke a beer bottle over the back of his head. He went down hard.

Romel Sucuzhanay, 38, who is visiting from Ecuador on a two-month visa, bounded over a parked car and ran as the man with the broken bottle came at him. A distance away, he looked back and saw a second assailant beating his prone brother with an aluminum baseball bat, striking him repeatedly on the head and body. The man with the broken bottle turned back and joined the beating and kicking.

"They used a baseball bat," said Diego Sucuzhanay, another brother. "I guess the goal was to kill him."

It looks like they succeeded.

An Ecuadorean immigrant who was brutally beaten in Brooklyn last weekend in what the police have described as a possible bias attack was declared brain-dead on Tuesday, a law enforcement official said. But the man was being kept on life support while his family decides whether to donate his organs, the official said.

. . .

Speaking outside the hospital, Diego Sucuzhanay said his brother had been singled out for his "skin color" and sounded a warning to other immigrants. "Today my brother is the victim, but tomorrow it could be your brother, your mother, your father," Mr. Sucuzhanay said.

I used to live in the next neighborhood over from Bushwick, and if a crime like this can happen in a Latin@ neighborhood like Bushwick, it can happen anywhere.  Who will be next?  When will those responsible for propagating anti-immigrant hysteria acknowledge the consequences of their efforts?