MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
All anyone could do was wait.
The witnesses had already testified. The legal arguments had all been made. The judge had issue his instructions, and the jurors were plodding on.
Did anyone know anything? Of course not. There’s nothing more opaque than a jury deliberating.
No one even knows when it may end.
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — Jeffrey Conroy has waited and wondered. At 19, he is on trial in at the courthouse in Riverhead over the stabbing death of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero, 37, near the Patchogue train station. The top charge is murder as a hate crime. The case is a criminal trial and a social debate rolled into one.
Did the delay mean the jurors were assembling damning evidence? Did it mean they were wrestling over reasonable doubt? Did the three days – and counting — mean some kind of jury-room horse-trading was underway?
Everyone on every side had an opinion. Nobody knew anything.
Except for this: Time ticks slowly when a jury is working.
And the walls of the jury room are very thick.
WORST COW HEADLINES EVER
1. “MOO-ve ‘Em Off the Tracks, Please”
2. “More MTA Bull?”
3. “East Patchogue’s Last Round-Up”
4. “The Electric Rodeo”
5. “Are Those Cows or Bulls? We Don’t Know – It’s the Suburbs”
ASKED AND UNSWERED: Do LIRR engineers have a special radio code for “cows on the tracks?” It’s so rare, who can remember?…Ready to be mocked across the country as a hot-tubbing, leather-faced, share-house loser? This could be your chance: Open “Jersey Shore” auditions April 26 and 27 at The Crazy Donkey in Farmingdale…The 23-percent drop in LI home foreclosures – quick dip or long trend?…What about Nassau-Suffolk unemployment rate? It’s down too, to 7.2 from 7.9 percent? You smelling a turn-around here?…Want to do something nice for an East Meadow college student drowning in medical bills? Then show up Monday night at La Novella Ristorante for Samantha Eisenberg’s fund-raiser. She and five friends were heading back to SUNY Buffalo when their car was broadsided by a tractor-trailer. After a month in a coma, Samantha’s talking again…With another 17 gang arrests on Friday, is a Long Island “West Side Story” inevitable now? Can the alleged MS-13’ers sing and dance?…Now that NY’s three big cable companies have agreed to share WiFi networks, what will Time Warner, Comcast and Cablevision agree on next? How much their broadband stomps AT&T’s and Verizon’s?…. Can Stony Brook Southampton really be saved? Do local pols Ken LaValle and Fred Thiele have a legal argument any stronger than Albany’s “deceptive acts and practices?” Doesn’t that apply to everything Albany does?….Any breast-cancer orgs need a pink limo for raffles, pledge walks or fund-raising giveaways? Mark Vigliante at Commack’s M&V Limo has a pink MINI Cooper he’d love to lend…Lessons learned? Have any lessons at all been learned from the death of the humpback whale?
Email ellis@henican.com. Follow on Twitter @henican.
ELLIS’ LONG ISLANDER OF THE WEEK
LINDA BOYD
For 16 years, renowned flutist Linda Boyd has been inspiring students at Wright Music in Port Washington, building a whole new generation of young flutists on Long Island. When one of Boyd’s students, eighth-grader Sarah Weiss, wanted to use her flute in a Bat Mitzvah project – the two of them came up with a unique idea: Why not put on a concert to benefit victims of the Haitian earthquake? As word spread around the music school, 16 other students agreed to join in. Their flute-and-piano concert, benefiting the Hope for Haiti Children’s Center, is set for Thursday, April 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Community Synagogue, 160 Middle Neck Road, Sands Point. “Sarah and all the students have been so generous with their talent and their time,” Boyd said. “They really are using their gifts to help people in need.”
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