Hate-crime trial makes town nervous

SHENANDOAH, Pa. (AP) — Though she’d never been to Mexico, Crystal Dillman somehow felt at home the moment she stepped inside the small concrete house in Iramuco. She ascended the stairs to the third floor and crossed the threshold of a spare, blue-tiled bedroom.

Luis’ bedroom.

Dillman sank into a chair and began to cry. Luis is here, she thought, and just like that, the sadness was replaced by a feeling of joy. For the first time since that horrible day in Pennsylvania, Dillman felt the presence of her fianc , Luis Ramirez, the father of her children, the immigrant who slipped into the United States illegally to work, only to return to Mexico in a coffin.

Five months after that emotional trip to his hometown, Dillman is back in Shenandoah and steeling herself for one of the most difficult ordeals of her life — the trial of two white teenagers charged in the fatal beating, which prosecutors call a hate crime.

Testimony begins today at the Schuylkill County Courthouse in Pottsville, where police are bracing for protests by activists on both sides of the immigration divide. Demonstrators will be kept a quarter-mile away.

Ramirez was beaten, authorities say, by teenage football players who had been out drinking in Shenandoah, a small northeastern Pennsylvania coal town 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia. Authorities say the teens yelled ethnic slurs as they punched and kicked Ramirez, a 25-year-old farmhand and factory worker.