November 21, 2004. Awakened by a loud bang and the ring of their doorbell, an interracial couple peered out the front window of their Long Island home at 3 a.m. yesterday and saw a cross burning on the front lawn.
They said they immediately called the Suffolk County police, but by the time officers arrived, rain had doused the fire. The police removed the cross, which was three feet tall and made from the slats of a picket fence. By yesterday afternoon, the only remaining trace was a charred circle of grass outside the building, a two-family house in the southwest corner of Lake Grove.
Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks said that the police and the F.B.I. were investigating the incident as a hate crime, but that there were no suspects.
It was the county’s first cross-burning since 1998, when a black family in Amityville returned home from church and found a burning cross on their lawn.
The Lake Grove home is a modest green split-level occupied by the couple, who rent the first floor, and another family upstairs.
The couple, who were not identified by the police, said that they had known each other for 30 years, had been married for 22 years and had lived in the house for 8. But they said that yesterday was the first time they felt attacked because of their relationship. The wife is white, and the husband is black.
”My first gut reaction was, how could this happen in the 21st century?” said the wife, who spoke only on the condition that she not be identified because she feared another attack. ”I don’t understand prejudice.”
Richard Eggert, who lives upstairs, said he was asleep when he heard a loud thud against the front door — a sound that he thinks was made to wake up the families.
”I ran into the bedroom, and with all the lights off, you could see the flickering on the front lawn,” he said.
By the time he raced downstairs to investigate, the husband was outside and whoever left the cross had vanished.
Yesterday afternoon, residents in the neighborhood, a middle-class community of rental homes, said they were baffled and unnerved by the cross-burning. No one had seen anyone set fire to the cross or drive or run away, and no one had any idea why the couple had been singled out.
”I’m very scared,” said Feroj Ahmad, 41, who lives across the street. ”I know the neighborhood is good. All day long, it’s very quiet. It’s strange, this thing.”
Conversations veered toward other occasions when bias has surfaced in the area.
Residents recalled a 1994 arson that destroyed a house that a black family was moving into in Nesconset, a predominantly white hamlet just west of Lake Grove. They also spoke of how, in 1997, the Ku Klux Klan planned a recruitment rally at the Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove, only to be met by community resistance.
The wife said that although her husband remained furious about the cross-burning, she felt that discussing the incident could help to prevent a recurrence.
”My feeling is, let’s talk about it, let’s get it out there,” she said, adding that that her anger toward those who set the blaze had subsided after a few hours, and that she had made up her mind to pray for them.
”Vengeance is the Lord’s,” she said. ”God will repay. That’s what the Bible says.”
Be First to Comment