He had toiled as an asphalt foreman for 21 years, rising each day at 3:30 a.m. to make the long commute to work and earn enough money to buy his family’s dream home in a well-to-do town on Long Island.
Neighbors said 53-year-old dad John White showed his pride in his accomplishment by meticulously tending to the family’s Miller Place home, right down to its landscaping and precise placement of flowers.
But the black father’s dream all too swiftly turned into a nightmare complete with racial hate, threats and ultimately, the killing of a white teen that he began standing trial for yesterday.
White’s lawyer, Paul Gianelli, told the jury in his opening statements in court in Riverhead that his client accidentally shot the teen, who allegedly taunted his son, and was only defending his family against a bunch of drunken racists.
“It was a mob – it was a lynch mob,” said Gianelli, referring to the group of five teens – including victim Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17 – who had descended on the White home that fateful night in August 2006.
The white teens had gone to White’s home apparently to confront his 19-year-old son, Aaron, after Cicciaro wrongly heard at a party that Aaron wanted to rape one of the 15-year-old white girls there.
“In the south, black men were hung because they were accused of having raped white women,” Gianelli said.
But prosecutors say White, who is accused of manslaughter, escalated the tensions between his family and the teens by wielding a firearm and deliberately shooting Cicciaro.
He should have locked himself in the home and awaited cops when the angry young men stormed over, instead of grabbing a gun, they argue.
The community has been riveted by the case as it highlights the two distinctly different worlds from which White and Cicciaro emerged before their deadly confrontation that night.
Cicciaro, who had recently graduated high school, was the son of an auto mechanic from the working-class town of Selden in Suffolk County.
Meanwhile, White had toiled for years to move his family out of the South Bronx.
His work ethic finally allowed him to buy his family a handsome home in the upper-middle-class town several years ago – and enough money for a Saab and a Volvo.
White quietly sat at the defense table in a neat suit and glasses yesterday listening as his lawyer told jurors: “This case is about a man, a man who was seeking to protect his family, his son.”
But Suffolk Assistant District Attorney James Chalifoux said the case is not about race or the struggles of being black in a white neighborhood. It’s about vigilante murder, he said.
“John White did not act as you folks would think a 53-year-old man would act,” he told the jury. “He confronted a bunch of unarmed boys.”
Chalifoux said White’s son woke his father at roughly 11 the night of the killing to tell him a group of boys was coming to attack him.
The prosecutor allowed that Cicciaro had used racial slurs against the younger White during a series of heated cell-phone calls before they arrived at the house.
White, Chalifoux said, heard cars screeching outside and quickly retrieved a .32-caliber pistol and a shotgun and confronted the group outside.
After a shouting match, Chalifoux said, White fired a bullet through Cicciaro’s cheek and into his head from roughly 3 inches away.
Chalifoux said White did not even attempt to assist the fallen boy after the shooting.
But Gianelli told the court the gun accidentally fired when Cicciaro, who had been drinking that night, tried to grab it from White’s hand as the dad retreated back into his home
The trial’s first witness, a cop who responded to the scene, said White admitted to the killing.
The officer ordered White to sit on a stoop as he investigated and that his son embraced his father and wouldn’t let go.
“This is the end for me,” John White said, according to the cop.