Police gather evidence in fatal subway attack

Police say they are developing more evidence to arrest the young people responsible for last week's killing of Sean Conroy, the Starbucks manager who died of an asthma attack after he was ambushed in a Center City subway concourse.

"The investigation is still going on," Homicide Sgt. Bob Wilkins said yesterday. "We don't have enough to arrest anybody yet."

Investigators want to make sure the case is "solid and it sticks," said Chief of Detectives Keith R. Sadler. "I'm fully confident they're going to bring it to a conclusion."

Police arrested Kinta Stanton, 16, a student at Simon Gratz High School, shortly after the March 26 attack. They said more arrests were expected.

Stanton, of the 4900 block of North Smedley Street in Logan, told investigators that he and at least three other truant Gratz students attacked Conroy at the 13th and Market Street subway concourse for no particular reason other than their own amusement. Conroy died within an hour of an asthma attack that the medical examiner said was brought on by the ambush.

Stanton was charged Thursday with murder and criminal conspiracy.

Though the attackers were black and the victim was white, Wilkins said police had no evidence that the attack was motivated by racial hatred. A flood of Internet commentators, newspaper letter writers, and a Philadelphia Daily News columnist have suggested Conroy's killing might be a "hate crime."

"The fact that blacks are accused of attacking a white, that doesn't make it a hate crime," Wilkins said. "We need some underlying evidence - something else for it to be elevated to a hate crime . . .. We don't have any evidence of racial epithets or racial slurs. They just jumped him."

Conroy, 36, was buried yesterday after a Funeral Mass at the Church of St. Cyril in East Lansdowne.

Remembered as a quiet, generous man, Conroy grew up in Upper Darby and settled in recent years in South Philadelphia. Three days before he was killed, he had become engaged to be married.

In interviews last week, Conroy's parents declined to characterize his death in racial terms. They said their son, who had started working for Starbucks in California before returning to the East Coast, was a "free spirit" who tried not to make racial distinctions.

"My son would have been the first one to say, 'Calm down. Let's get the facts,' " said Sharon Conroy, 54. "I wish other people would do that . . . To his thinking, nobody was black, nobody white, short, tall. People were people."

Prosecutors declined to talk about Conroy's case specifically because it is still under investigation.

But John P. Delaney Jr., head of the district attorney's trial division, said prosecutors need to have evidence that an offender had a "malicious intention" motivated by hatred of a person on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin in order to bring charges of "ethnic intimidation."

"There has to be evidence," Delaney said. "Most commonly, it comes in a statement made during the commission of the crime."

A perpetrator might also make a statement to somebody before or after a crime ascribing hatred as a motive.

Though a SEPTA police sergeant heard the victim scream and witnessed part of the attack, Sadler said investigators extracted no admission of a racial motive from Stanton.

"Unfortunately, the deceased can't speak to tell us what he heard," Sadler said.

Delaney said prosecutors "do not shy" from bringing charges of ethnic intimidation.

The FBI counted 7,722 hate-crime incidents nationwide in 2006, of which 4,000 were on the basis of race. Of those, 890 were crimes against whites and 2,640 were anti-black.

Philadelphia accounted for 34 of 93 hate-crime incidents reported in Pennsylvania in 2006, according to the FBI statistics.

In a year of declining crime rates, last week's assault came as a shock - a midday attack against an innocent bystander in the heart of Center City, a prosperous area that is relatively free of the violent crime more common in struggling neighborhoods.

Conroy was jumped about 2:35 p.m., when as many as four teens who had been walking behind him decided to "body drop" him. The maneuver, in which assailants try to knock out somebody with a single, devastating, surprise punch, has become an attraction on the Internet: videos of such attacks have been posted on YouTube and similar sites.

After he was punched from behind, Conroy fell to his knees and apparently tried to fight back. His assailants continued to punch and kick him, a beating that triggered an asthma attack followed by acute distress and death.

Conroy's mother said last week she had read some of the Internet chatter claiming the killing was racially motivated.

"If it turns out these kids were motivated by race, they will have to answer for it," she said. "Bottom line is this was a man minding his own business . . . and four kids on a lark took his life away.

"Where is society? Where did the humanity go?"