By Michelle Han
A South Ozone Park man was convicted last week and two others were acquitted in the racially motivated attack against a 19-year-old Indo-Caribbean American from Richmond Hill and his two cousins nearly two years ago.
Nuno Martins, 20, of 114th Street in South Ozone Park, was convicted of first-degree assault, a felony charge, and two counts of aggravated harassment, both misdemeanors, in the Sept. 20, 1998 beating attack on Rishi Maharaj of Richmond Hill.
Peter DiMarco, 20, of College Point, and Luis Amorim, 23, of South Ozone Park, the two other defendants charged in the attack, were found innocent.
The trial before a racially mixed jury lasted 14 days in State Supreme Court in Kew Gardens. Jurors deliberated about 15 hours before delivering a verdict shortly before 6 p.m. last Wednesday, May 17.
Lawyers for the two acquitted men had argued throughout the trial that their clients had simply tried to break up the attack. They depicted DiMarco and Amorim as racially tolerant, hardworking young men who were sitting at the end of a long day with Martins on the front stoop of his South Ozone Park home when Martins went after Maharaj in a rage.
Both men, lawyers told jurors during closing arguments, had no blood stains on their clothing or shoes as Martins did, and were sitting halfway down the block when Martins began the assault.
“The jury did a totally credible job,” said Stephen Singer, attorney for DiMarco. “This verdict was exactly as it should have been.”
The event, which left Maharaj, now 22, lying in a puddle of blood with three fractures to his head, galvanized politicians and minority advocacy groups in New York and Washington in a cry for a state hate-crimes bill for what was immediately called a bias crime against people of Indian descent.
Martins was immediately remanded into custody. He faces up to 25 years in jail when he is sentenced May 31 by Judge Mark Spires, who presided over the trial.
Martins and the other defendants were accused of severely beating Maharaj and yelling racial epithets at him and his two cousins as they were out for a late-evening walk near his uncle's South Ozone Park home.
Maharaj and his two cousins testified that he apologized for speaking loudly after someone yelled at him to be quiet. He spent eight days in the hospital and said he remembers little else about the attack.
Maharaj, whose parents hail from Trinidad but who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Richmond Hill, said in an interview he had mixed feelings about the verdict.
“I think we're all still in shock,” he said. “We're happy, but this was a crime that involved three people and two of the people are walking free.”
He said the incident nearly two years ago was a sad confirmation of suspicions about prejudice he had felt for years, growing up in a once predominantly white neighborhood.
“It doesn't surprise me that it happened,” said Maharaj, who had completed two years as a political science major at SUNY Plattsburgh and was taking a semester off to work. “I was hoping it wouldn't. But it's something that people of color face everyday. We, the Indo-Caribbean community, just happen to be the new group.”
In the weeks that followed the attack, with intense media coverage and advocates and politicians rallying on his behalf, Maharaj said it was difficult being cast as “the Indian boy who got beaten” when he was, in fact, a born U.S. citizen.
“Being an American, I've fought for that label,” he said. “I'm proud to be an American and I'll always put that – American – first.”
But he said the incident was proof that prejudice and ignorance were alive and well. “Sometimes you try to convince yourself that it's just paranoia,” he said. “Then something like this happens and it shows you it's not just paranoia.”
Throughout the trial, all three defendants, clean-shaven and wearing suits and ties, were supported by family and friends who filled the benches in the courtroom.
Lawyers for the three defendants were adamant throughout the trial that the case was being improperly labeled a bias crime. Singer said DiMarco was engaged to be married to a Korean-American woman and Paul Senzer, attorney for Amorim, said his client worked for an Indian- owned bagel store as a delivery boy.
Martins' attorney, Benedict Gullo, said his client was involved in a fight but nothing more. He conceded that his client, the son of Portuguese immigrants, swore and used language about race but said it was merely “descriptive.”
“I think we all know what the pejorative words are and those were never used,” he said. “My client is not prejudiced. It was never a bias incident.”
Assistant District Attorney Mariela Stanton, of the district attorney's Anti-Bias/Youth Gang Bureau, said the jury's decision to find Martins guilty on the two aggravated harassment counts confirmed a racial intent.
“Clearly the jury has spoken about that in their finding on the aggravated harassment,” she said. “This was a hate crime.”
District Attorney Richard Brown condemned the incident, saying in a statement, “This vicious and unprovoked attack on a defenseless young man because of his ethnicity shocked and outraged all of us.”
“The jury's verdict sends a clear and unequivocal message that attacks such as these can never be tolerated,” he said.
