Joseph Ballance
By Jennifer Peltz, Associated Press Writer
A landscaper from Islandia with a virulent hatred of Islam tried to run over two Muslim women at a suburban gas station after threatening to kill them because of their religion, police said Thursday.
Joseph Ballance, 23, was awaiting arraignment Thursday on an aggravated harassment charge in the Aug. 20 confrontation. It came less than a week after an Ecuadorean man was beaten and robbed in an alleged bias attack in a nearby community in the county, where tensions over Hispanic immigration have simmered for years.
Ballance approached the 49-year-old woman and her 20-year-old daughter, who were wearing the traditional Muslim robes called abayas, in a service station parking lot in Smithtown, Suffolk police said. After hurling epithets and a death threat at them, Ballance spat on their car, got into his own and backed up to try to hit them, police said.
The self-employed landscaper later told investigators he wanted to cut the women up, saying, “They don’t belong here” and “They shouldn’t be walking around like that,” Detective Sgt. Robert Reecks said.
“He is full of hatred,” Reecks said. “He saw them, the way they were dressed, and it just set him off.”
Authorities didn’t immediately know whether Ballance had a lawyer, and a message left at his Islandia home wasn’t immediately returned.
The women were not hurt; their names weren’t released. One of them took down the license plate number on the car Ballance was driving and gave it to police, Reecks said.
The aggravated harassment charge against Ballance is used for crimes related to a victim’s race, religion or certain other characteristics.
Ballance’s arrest came a day after two teenagers pleaded not guilty to assault as a hate crime in the robbery and beating of Ecuadorean day laborer Milton Balbuca. A 20-year-old also has been charged in the Aug. 14 attack.
Police said they shouted anti-Mexican remarks and racial epithets as they attacked Balbuca near the Patchogue train station — the same area where another Ecuadorean immigrant, 37-year-old dry cleaning worker Marcelo Lucero, was stabbed and killed in November. Patchogue is about 15 miles southeast of Smithtown near Long Island’s southern shore.
Seven teenagers have pleaded not guilty to hate crime and other charges in Lucero’s death. It helped spur an ongoing U.S. Justice Department investigation into bias crimes on eastern Long Island and prompted an outcry from Hispanic residents who said police hadn’t taken previous assaults on Hispanics seriously.
Strife over Suffolk County’s thousands of immigrants from Central and South America has percolated for nearly a decade, sometimes erupting in violence.
Two men are serving long prison terms for attempted murder after luring two Mexican laborers to a warehouse in 2000 with the promise of work, then beating them with shovels and landscaping tools. In 2003, teenagers tossed fireworks through a Mexican family’s window on the Fourth of July, damaging the home.
Officials stress that they are attentive to bias crimes.
“This kind of behavior has no place in Suffolk County,” Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy said Thursday.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
