"Supposedly my block has been under surveillance for years," said Ednita Lorenzo, a 22-year-old Mexican living in Port Richmond. "There's one of those NYPD signs up on the corner."
Lorenzo recalled feeling tension between blacks and Mexicans as far back as elementary school but doesn't attribute hate as the prime motivator in the recent attacks.
She said that thieves target Mexicans because cash-carrying day laborers might hesitate reporting an attack to the police because of their own immigration status.
That's why John Messiha, one of Lorenzo's childhood friends, accidentally killed her father's cousin, Ricardo Salinas, four years ago, in one of the many but less frequent attacks that foreshadowed this summer's violence.
Messiha, an Egyptian American, then 17, testified against his two black codefendants and admitted that they wanted to "rob a Mexican."
"It hurt when I saw that quote in the paper," Lorenzo said. "But I knew it was more about him being defenseless than him being Mexican."
