The trial of three former police officers in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, who are alleged to have covered up anti-immigrant hate-crime killing, continued this week.
The police are on trial in federal court for hindering the investigation of the 2008 hate-crime killing of Mexican immigrant Luis Ramirez.
On Tuesday, witness Ed Ney testified that he was one of the first people on the scene after the deadly attack took place. According to Ney, when police officers William Moyer and Jason Hayes arrived at the scene and realized that they knew the young men who had attacked Ramirez, the police “looked shocked and confused.”
Once the police saw who the attackers were “the drive that they had to catch the individuals had changed,” Ney said. As the court later learned, one of the officers was dating the mother of one of the young men. Ney told the court that they no longer seemed interested in arresting the perpetrators of the crime.
Ney said that the police then told him to “shut up” and they patted him down and appeared to threaten him with a Taser when he asked why he was being detained.
The trial continued today.
