Authorities in the tiny coal community say race was not a factor, despite the racist slurs . A retired police officer said that after a gang of Whites beat a Mexican immigrant to death last weekend in a Pennsylvania coal town she heard one of the assaulters yell for him to tell his friends to get out of town “or you’re going to be laying next to him.” Eileen Burke, the former Philly cop who now lives on the street in Shenandoah, Pa., where the 25-year-old Luis Ramirez was pummeled. Notwithstanding the barrage of racial slurs that witnesses say the assailants hurled at Ramirez, authorities in Shenandoah, a 5,000-resident town about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia, say that the beating was not racially motivated, The Associated Press reports. Shenandoah, which has seen a growing number of Hispanic residents pour in to work the factories and farms, has also witnessed a rise in conflict between Whites and Latinos. Ramirez’s fiancée, 24-year-old Crystal Dillman, who is White and was raised in Shenandoah, said locals often called her boyfriend racist names, like “dirty Mexican,” and told him to go back to Mexico, AP reports. “People in this town are very racist toward Hispanic people. They think right away if you’re Mexican, you’re illegal, and you’re no good,” said Dillman. She has two young children by Ramirez and a 3-year-old who thought of him as her father, according to AP . ...
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