A gang of Long Island youths showed up at a black man's house and started shouting racial epithets and looking for a fight, one of them gets shot in the face. It was later revealed that the allegations of "rape threats" were a creation of the guido youths.
We now mourn the loss of an innocent soul who could have become a... no, no can't do itNovember 28, 2007
Defense in Teenager’s Death Invokes Memories of Lynch Mobs
By PAUL VITELLO
RIVERHEAD, N.Y., Nov. 27 — The trial of a black man accused of killing a white youth who threatened his son will be as much about race and the echoes of Jim Crow lynch mobs as about the five minutes on a hot August night in 2006 when a white teenager was shot in the face, defense lawyers for the man suggested on Tuesday.
“In the South, black men were hung because they were accused of rape, and ironically, the incident that propelled the events of that night had the same sort of background,” said Paul Gianelli, the lawyer for the defendant, John H. White, 54, a construction foreman. Mr. White, who moved with his family into the predominantly white Long Island hamlet of Miller Place only two years before the killing, faces charges of manslaughter and gun possession in Suffolk County Criminal Court here.
“They were a mob, a lynch mob,” Mr. Gianelli said of the five youths who tracked Mr. White’s son, Aaron, 20, to his home that night.
The lawyer said the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, 17, and the other youths spewed racial epithets at Mr. White and his son that night. Police have said that the youths wanted to beat Aaron White because they believed he had posted a message on an Internet chat room threatening to rape a 15-year-girl they all knew.
Mr. White intended to use the gun only to disperse the group, Mr. Gianelli said, and it went off accidentally when Mr. Cicciaro grabbed for it.
In his opening statement, the assistant district attorney, James Chalifoux, conceded that racial epithets were shouted during the confrontation. He told the jury that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends had been drinking heavily before the shooting, but that the prosecution’s case would focus not on the decisions made by the victim but on those made by Mr. White.
“Some of you may not agree with what Daniel Cicciaro did that night,” he said. “But this trial is about John White’s actions. He did not act the way you would expect of a grown, 53-year-old man.”
Mr. Chalifoux continued: “John White did not lock his doors. He did not call 911. He did not go outside and try to defuse a volatile situation.” Then, he added: “Instead, he armed his 19-year-old son with a loaded shotgun. He armed himself with an illegal .32-caliber handgun. And he confronted these unarmed boys.”
After the shooting, Mr. White lifted his hands and, the prosecutor said, told the first police officer at the scene: “Some kids were trying to assault my son. I did what I had to do. You might as well put the cuffs on me.”
Police initially charged Mr. White with murder. A grand jury reduced that charge to manslaughter in the second degree, the equivalent of reckless homicide. In July, however, Mr. White rejected a plea bargain that would have guaranteed him a maximum sentence of two to six years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea.
If convicted on the manslaughter charge, he faces 5 to 15 years in prison.
In September 2006, Mr. White said in an interview that he had seen the youths not as a “white mob” but as “a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”
During the interview, he described himself, unprompted, as the grandson of an Alabama man whose two brothers were lynched in the 1940s. He also said the .32-caliber revolver he used in the killing was bequeathed to him by his grandfather for protection.
The tall, bespectacled Mr. White sat impassively at the defense table Tuesday, occasionally taking notes.
Behind him, less than 20 feet away, sat Daniel Cicciaro’s father, Daniel, and his mother, Joanne Cicciaro. She clutched her midsection and gently rocked through most of a day of highly charged, gruesomely detailed re-enactments and descriptions of her son’s death: The single gunshot wound in the left cheek, the three inches between shooter and victim, the large pool of blood in the driveway and the victim’s cellphone lying nearby.
Both sides agreed that the dispute that led to the confrontation began at a birthday party. Aaron White was a guest along with all of the youths involved. At some point, a young girl known to all of them complained that his presence made her uncomfortable. Mr. Cicciaro and several others asked him to leave, and he did.
When the girl later told the youths she was uncomfortable because of a threat she believed was posted in an online chat room, Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue the matter. He phoned Aaron White, cursing him, and then found out where he lived and left with his friends to find him.
They arrived in two cars, blocking off the driveway of the Whites’ home.
The first witness on Tuesday, the Whites’ next door neighbor, Anthony Morano, said the first sign of trouble he noticed was the sound of the cars “racing up and down the street,” apparently looking for the Whites’ address.
“Very noisy cars, they sounded like mini-motorcycles,” he said.
Then he heard “very boisterous arguing,” he said, and “a loud pop.”
When he looked out his upstairs window, he said, “I seen something fall to the floor, to the street.”
Earlier, Mr. Morano described Mr. White as a quiet, “Hello, how are you?” kind of neighbor who was meticulous about caring for his lawn and his flower beds.
