Lucero's mother says she's not prepared to be at trial

Rosario Lucero sat in the tiny kitchen of the cramped second-floor apartment her son Joselo rents in Patchogue, miles away from the courtroom in Riverhead where the hate crime trial for the murder of her other son, Marcelo, was under way.

Rosario and her daughter Isabel had traveled from Gualaceo, Ecuador, to attend the trial, but when Monday morning broke, Rosario realized she was not emotionally and physically up to seeing her son's alleged killer, Jeffrey Conroy, in person for the first time.

"I don't want to see what they did to my son," she said in Spanish, referring to the brutal and explicit testimony at the trial. "It's hard to listen to it."

She was wearing a black dress and sandals, her dark hair pulled back neatly across her head. She tended to an Ecuadorean Holy Week specialty, a soup called "fanesca," on the stove and kept an eye on Isabel's 3-year-old son, Isaac, as he worked on a Spiderman puzzle.

She said it was her fourth trip to Long Island since her son was killed in Patchogue in November 2008, and it hasn't gotten any easier. "I always have this memory of him alive here," she said, tears rolling down her face. "Nothing fills this emptiness."

Rosario, Isabel and Isaac arrived in New York late Wednesday night, spent some time resting, and attended an Easter Sunday service at the Brookville Reformed Church, where Ecuadorean immigrant Rev. Allan Ramirez said he preached about Rosario's faith and ability to forgive her son's alleged killer.

"Most of us just talk about forgiveness," Ramirez said. "It's another thing to hear this person whose son has been butchered" offer forgiveness.

He added that as one sign of Rosario's selflessness, her family said she woke up Monday at 5:30 a.m. to start the "fanesca" so Joselo could bring a pot of it to Ramirez at the courthouse as a form of appreciation.

As Joselo and Isabel walked into the courthouse close to 10 a.m., Isabel said she was unsure what she felt toward Conroy, whom she was about to see for the first time. "It's not hate," she said in Spanish. "It's something I can't explain. It's an emptiness."

She had little to say after the session was over. "We'll leave it for later," she said.

Back at the house, Rosario said she could only hope for justice. "I'm waiting, nothing else," she said. "At the end of the day, my son is not here."