Small U.S town broods after fatal beating of immigrant
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David Montgomery reports for the Washington Post from Shenandoah, Va., where Mexican immigrant Luis Eduardo Ramirez was beaten to death by a group of current and former high school football players in July.
The small community has embraced generations of immigrants from 18 other nations for the last 150 years -- but differences run deep and divisions simmer below the surface.
Montgomery reports from the small town on its Heritage Day, during which representatives from different nations around the world now living in Shenandoah parade through the streets, adorned in national costume.
It’s been a brutal summer: families grieving, clean-cut local sons charged with murder and ‘ethnic intimidation,’ the Justice Department conducting its own investigation, big-city activists riding from over the hills like rival cavalries to conduct dueling demonstrations. And the beloved Blue Devils of the Anthracite Football League are forced to play with a depleted roster, owing to the criminal charges against three current or former players. ‘It’s a quiet town. Well, it was, until they murdered the Mexican,’ says Kitty Merrick, the widow of an Irish American, whose maiden name, Glabyte, places her in the Lithuanian parade contingent.
Read the whole dispatch on Shenandoah here.