Free Republic

The Shenandoah police chief and two officers under his command are charged with orchestrating a cover-up in the fatal beating of a Mexican immigrant by altering evidence or lying to the FBI in a hate crimes case against two popular football players. The former Shenandoah High School athletes, 19-year-old Derrick Donchak and 18-year-old Brandon Piekarsky, have now been charged with a federal hate crime, accused of beating Luis Ramirez in a park on a night in July 2008 as they headed home from a party, the Justice Department said Tuesday in Washington. State prosecutors who tried unsuccessfully to win ethnic...

SCRANTON - Brandon J. Piekarsky will spend his 19th birthday behind federal prison bars after a jury on Thursday convicted him and his friend, Derrick M. Donchak, of a hate crime for participating in the fatal beating of an illegal Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah. In a case that has attracted international attention, the all-white jury of six men and six women found Piekarsky, 18, of Shenandoah Heights, and Donchak, 20, of Shenandoah, guilty of violating the federal Fair Housing Act by assaulting Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala. Donchak and his parents sobbed, and Piekarsky grimaced, as federal marshals handcuffed the pair...