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...

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has launched an online petition asking for signatures urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the death of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala and bring federal charges against the defendants who were acquitted on most county charges Friday. “There’s a strong federal interest in eradicating the bias that motivated the violence and a fed prosecution is definitely in the public interest,” MALDEF staff attorney Gladys Limon said in a telephone interview Tuesday. Two Shenandoah area teens were found not guilty of the most serious charges facing them in relation to the death...

POTTSVILLE — Two Shenandoah teenagers were acquitted late Friday night of killing illegal Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez Zavala. Brandon J. Piekarsky, 17, of Shenandoah Heights, and Derrick M. Donchak, 19, of Shenandoah, were convicted of simple assault. The Schuylkill County jury also convicted Donchak on three counts of corruption of minors and three counts of furnishing alcohol to minors. The defendants hugged each other after the verdicts were read, and friends and family members clapped. Jurors deliberated for nearly eight hours before reaching their verdict around 10:45 p.m., Friday. The all-white jury of six men and six women began deliberating...

Two Pennsylvania teens were acquitted of murder, aggravated assault and ethnic intimidation charges Friday in the beating death of a Mexican immigrant last summer. However, a Schuylkill County jury found Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak guilty of simple assault stemming from the death of Luis Ramirez, who died of blunt force injuries to the head after a fight with the defendants and their friends. Donchak, 19, was also found guilty of providing alcohol to the group of teens that encountered Ramirez the night of July 12 on a residential street in the rural mining town of Shenandoah. Prosecutors alleged the...