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"It was because he was Mexican"

The victim was a factory and field worker. Apparently, the alleged perpetrators are related to the police department and/or football players on the local high…

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In the hospital his brain began swelling and the blows to his head caused blood clots on the left part of his brain. The doctors had to remove a section of his skull (to relieve the pressure). The swelling continued, pressing on his brain stem until he fell into a coma.

Luis Eduardo Ramírez called his fiancée
the night of July 12 and asked her to leave the door unlocked so as not
to awake her or their children. He was with his friends, Victor and
Ariell García, where they drank a few beers and chatted about the dangers that life presents.

“We
were hanging out and talking in my house and he mentioned how his
grandmother used to tell him to be careful if he ever got into a fight.
Any blow in a fight could be fatal… It’s strange that he brought that up that night,” Victor García said.

The couple offered him a ride home but the 25-year-old immigrant worker from Guanajuato, Mexico, also known as “Caballo,” refused and insisted that he would just walk home.

Five minutes later, García received a call for help from his friend.

“He
was exasperated when he called me. He told me to go back and meet him
by the park because there was a group of guys attacking him. I could
hear them yelling behind him over the phone,” García said.

Crystal A. Dillman, Ramírez’s fiancée also received a call for help at 11:40 p.m. She received a text message that said, “Help.”

"When
Ariell and I got there we saw a lot of guys. I tried to separate them
and get them off of him but there were too many of them, I couldn’t do it,” García said. “They
beat him pretty bad, when he fell to the floor they kept on kicking him
in the head and then he started shaking and foaming at the mouth. At
that point I realized that he was in bad shape.”

The
incident occurred in the blue-collar town of Shenandoah, Pa., where a
majority of residents pride themselves in their Italian heritage. A
growing Hispanic community also resides in the quiet town, where many
immigrants have turned to for work. The fight occurred at the corner of
Lloyd and Vine St., just two blocks down from the mayor’s home.

“When
he (Eduardo) fell to the floor the neighbors came out and were telling
us that we needed to call an ambulance. I felt that they arrived there
pretty fast, but when the police arrived we told them, ‘The kids went that way!’ and they told us that was not what they were looking for,” García said.

“They
received a call telling them there was a Mexican man with a gun chasing
a bunch of kids, so they began searching my car and myself looking for
a gun,” García commented with resentment in his voice.

Ten
days after the beating, lieutenant Bill Moyer, of the Shenandoah police
department acknowledged that they did not put as much importance to a
911 call that involved a fight between juveniles on the street. They
were more concerned with finding an armed person.

When AL DÍA
asked what happened to the man with the gun, Moyer hesitated and
responded that the case was still under investigation. Moyer then
admitted that they found a bb gun in a neighboring field.

“I
know anything could have started the fight, but it had to do with the
fact that he was Mexican. I could hear them yelling behind him, ‘Mexican! Mexican this! Mexican that!’ If they had a legitimate problem with him, they would not be yelling racial slurs at him,” García said.

"There
is bad blood against Hispanics in this town. Ever since I got here 10
years ago, people have insulted me solely on the fact that I am Mexican… I want justice for my friend’s death; I want those kids to pay for what they did,” García said.

García’s
wife, Ariell, 17, admitted that she attends Shenandoah Valley High with
some of the youths involved and that they are in her grade as well.

“Caballo’s phone kept ringing and when I picked it up it was Crystal on the line. I told her that he was on the ground and that he wasn’t breathing. I told her to come down right away,” García said.

“I called back right away and Victor answered his phone. He told me Eduardo was unconscious on the floor. I couldn’t believe what he was telling me, but I rushed down there…
When I got there, there was a large group of people on the corner and
as I got closer I looked down and saw Eduardo on the floor,” Dillman said.

Dillman, 24, recalled the days when she had just met and fell in love with Eduardo. “We
met through mutual friends. We were able to talk real well at first and
our friendship turned into a relationship after a few months, then he
asked me to marry him,” Dillman said. “He supported me when I was pregnant with my daughter Anjelina, and although he wasn’t her father he still took care of us.”

“People used to always say real ignorant things to him like, ‘Why don’t you go back to Mexico!’ but he wouldn’t let it escalate to violence, there was never a physical confrontation,” she said.

Dillman
questions why Shenandoah police took so long to arrive on the scene,
she explained that they got there after the ambulance had already taken
Ramírez’s body to a hela-pad where he would be transported to Geysinger Medical Center. She added that her fiancée did not receive medical attention until after an hour of being unconscious as well.

“When I saw him after he got out of surgery he looked real bad. You wouldn’t have recognized him, he was not responsive and the doctors told us that he wasn’t going to make it,” Dillman recalled. “He
had bruises all over his face and he had his medallion (of Jesus
Christ) imprinted on his chest where they were stomping on him. They
collapsed his lung and beat him from all sides.”

“While
in the hospital, his brain kept swelling and he had a blood clot on the
left side of his brain. They removed a piece of his skull to relieve
the pressure but his brain kept on swelling, putting pressure on his
brain stem until he finally fell into a coma,” Dillman said.

On Monday morning, Ramírez
was disconnected from the life support machine that kept him alive for
two days. For Dillman, the worst of it all happened when she held her
fiancée’s hand as his life faded away. 

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