Melting Point

Ramirez went into a coma and died two days later.

Thirteen days later, Piekarsky and Walsh were charged as adults with third-degree murder, ethnic intimidation (Pennsylvania's term for a hate crime) and other crimes. Donchak was charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation and other crimes. Charges are pending against another juvenile, according to District Attorney James Goodman.

That night, as the young men scattered, according to Burke, Piekarsky shouted a final warning to one of Ramirez's two female friends by then on the scene: "You [expletive] bitch! You tell your [expletive] Mexican friends to get the [expletive] out of Shenandoah or you're going to be laying [expletive] next to him!"

In the Aftermath

The words make Shenandoah wince, Latinos and non-Latinos alike. They suggest a context for the violence. But what do they mean? Is Shenandoah a racist place, its immigrants' pride and promise a cruel fraud?

Piekarsky and Walsh were held in the county prison, the same castle where 130 years ago alleged members of the Molly Maguires, the secret militant Irish miners' group, were hanged on dubious charges. The two were led in shackles into the courtroom packed with their family and friends, and the teenage girls filling one bench burst into tears.

Dillman sat in the front row, sobbing quietly. Her lone companion was an attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

"Here we go again," Roger Laguna, Walsh's attorney, said later. "Hang 'em all, and 50 years from now we'll figure out maybe we should have slowed down and demanded some facts or demanded some evidence." Laguna, the grandson of a Mexican immigrant, grew up around Reading where he says he heard the term "spic" in plenty of playground fights. "When people fight they call each other names," he said. "This fight was not racially motivated simply because someone used racial terms."

The young men's attorneys challenge the credibility of witnesses and their ability to pinpoint who said what and who landed which blows. They also argue that Ramirez was an aggressor who kept the fight going longer than it might have lasted.

It wasn't murder, "this was mutual combat," Piekarsky's attorney, Frederick Fanelli, said in court. No trial date has been set. (The families of the three accused did not respond to interview requests.)

Homicide in a small town is a tragedy with multiple roles for everybody.

Among the first Shenandoah police officers on the scene were one who is a friend of Piekarsky's mother and another who is the father of a teammate, according to a witness and local officials. Police knew within hours who was involved but arrested no one for nearly two weeks.

The day after the beating, most of the players and at least some of their parents went to Piekarsky's house. "We made up a plan that we were going to tell the cops," Lawson testified. "That nobody kicked him. There was no racial slurs. There was no booze. And Brian [Scully] got hit first."