Jeffrey Toobin - The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

FROM The New Yorker

W HAT HAPPENED AT THE FOOT of the driveway at 40 Independence Way that hot August night in 2006 took less than three minutes. The police later managed to time it precisely, using a surveillance camera that points directly at the street from a house a couple of doors to the north. The readout on the surveillance tape said that it was 23:06:11 when two cars whizzed by going south, toward the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. At 23:09:06, the first car passed back in front of the camera, going north. A minute later, a second car passed in the same direction. In the back seat of that second cara black Mustang Cobra convertiblewas a seventeen-year-old boy named Daniel Cicciaro, Jr., known to his friends as Dano. He was unconscious and bleeding profusely. He had been shot through the cheek. A .32-calibre bullet was lodged in his head.

Normally, at that time of night, not many cars are seen on Independence Way, a quiet street in a town called Miller Place. Just east of Port Jefferson, on the North Shore of Long Island, Miller Place is in the part of Suffolk County where the commuters have begun to thin out. To the east is a large swatch of the county that doesnt seem strongly connected to the huge city in one direction or to the high-priced summer resorts and North Fork wineries in the other. The house at 40 Independence Way is part of a development, Talmadge Woods, that five or six years ago was a peach orchard; its now a collection of substantial two-story, four-bedroom houses that the developer started offering in 2003 for about half a million dollars each. The houses vary in design, but they all have an arched front door topped by the arched glass transom known in the trade as a Palladian windowa way to bring light into the double-height entry hall. When people are asked to describe the neighborhood, they tend to say upper middle class. The homeowner with the surveillance system is an orthodontist. Miller Place could also be described as overwhelmingly white. According to a study released a few years ago, Long Island is the single most segregated suburban area in the United States. The residents of 40 Independence WayJohn and Sonia White and their youngest son, Aaronare African-American and so are their next-door neighbors, but the black population of Miller Place is less than one-half of one per cent. The Whites, who began married life in Brooklyn in the early seventies, had moved to Miller Place after ten years in North Babylon, which is forty minutes or so closer to the city. You want to raise your family in a safe environment, John White, a tall, very thin man in his early fifties, has said, explaining why he was willing to spend three hours a day in his car commuting. The educational standards are higher. You want to live a comfortable life, which is the American dream. One of the Whites sons is married, with children of his own, and a second is in college in the South. But Aaron was able to spend his senior year at Miller Place High School, which takes pride in such statistics as how many of its students are in Advanced Placement history courses. Aaron, an erect young man who is likely to say sir when addressing one of his elders, graduated in June of 2005. He was one of four black students in the class.

In an area where home maintenance is a priority, 40 Independence Way could hold its own. John White is a serious gardenera nurturer of daylilies and clematis, a planter of peel-bark birch treesand someone who had always been proud, maybe even touchy, about his property. People who have been neighbors of the Whites tend to use the word meticulous in describing John White; so do people who have worked with him. He has described himself as a doersomeone too restless to sit around reading a book or watching television. He says that hes fished from Nova Scotia to the Bahamas. Hes done a lot of huntinga pastime he was taught by his grandfather Napoleon White, whose familys migration from Alabama apparently took place after a murderous attack by the Ku Klux Klan. At the Faith Baptist Church, in Coram, Long Island, John White sang in both the mens choir and the mixed Celebration Choir. A couple of polished-wood tables in the Whites house were made by him. Hes a broadly accomplished man, and proud of it. His wife, who was born in Panama, works as a manager in a department store and has that Caribbean accent which, maybe because its close to the accent of West Indian nurses, conveys both competence and the firm intention to brook no nonsense. The Whites furniture tastes lean toward Stickley, Audi. Their sons dress in a style thats preppy. Sitting in his well-appointed family room, John White could be taken for middle management.

But he doesnt have the sort of education or occupation that would seem to go along with the house he lives in. After graduating from a technical program at Samuel Gompers High School, he worked as an electrician for seven or eight years and then, during a slow time for electricians, he began working in the paving industry. For the past twenty-five years, he has worked for an asphalt company in Queens, patching the potholes left by utility repair crews. He is often described as a foreman, which he once was, but he says that, partly because of an aversion to paperwork, he didnt try to reclaim that job after it evaporated during a reduction in the workforce. (Im actually a laborer.) On August 9, 2006, a Wednesday, he had, as usual, awakened at three-thirty in the morning for the drive to Queens, spent the day at work, and, after a stop to pick up some bargain peony plants, returned to what he calls his dream house or his castle. He retired early, so that he could do the same thing the next day. A couple of hours later, according to his testimony, he was awakened by Aaron, who, with a level of terror John White had never heard in his sons voice, shouted, Dad, these guys are coming here to kill me! Instead, as it turned out, John White killed Daniel Cicciaro, Jr.