It was booze, not hate, that fueled the deadly beating of an Ecuadorian immigrant with a baseball bat, a defense lawyer argued this morning at the start of his client’s retrial for the December 2008 killing.
Prosecutors charge that Keith Phoenix, 30, attacked José Sucuzhanay, hurling anti-gay and anti-Hispanic epithets at the the victim, who he thought was gay because he was walking arm-in-arm with his brother, Romel.
“Alcohol was running through this like the Nile River runs through Egypt,” Phoenix’s lawyer, Philip Smallman, told jurors today.
Phoenix and his cohort, Hakim Scott, “beat José Sucuzhanay with a bat and a bottle, leaving him lying in a pool of blood on the streets Brooklyn, bleeding to death,” said prosecutor Josh Hanshaft before a fresh set of jurors in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
Phoenix’s first trial ended in a hung jury last month; Scott, was convicted of manslaughter.
“We want justice,” said Diego Sucuzhanay, 28, a brother of the victim, outside the courtroom. “We don’t want a jury that could just give up in the end, like what happened (last time).”