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Cicciaro's outburst adds to two families' pain

Ellis Henican

March 21, 2008

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We are, at the worst moments of our lives, asked to reach into our better natures and pull out our hidden reserves of composure and grace.

This isn't fair. It's almost superhuman, this moral demand that we be at our best when circumstances are at their most abysmal.

But such is the stuff that character is made of. And such is the way that forever we are remembered and judged.

Let's begin with the obvious. It is hard even to imagine the pain and the rage felt by Daniel Cicciaro. His 17-year-old son, Daniel Jr., was shot to death in a Miller Place driveway two Augusts ago.

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The fact that the boy had arrived with drunken friends looking for trouble - that does nothing to ease the fatherly pain. Nor does the fact that the man who killed young Daniel, John White, certainly did not awaken that morning itching to shoot a teenager in the face.

The son is dead. The jury has spoken. So has the sentencing judge. And the father, in all his understandable torment, has shown what he has shown to the world.

In a sputtering barrage of anger, sarcasm, vulgarity, self-pity and what sounded awfully like a threat, Daniel Cicciaro Sr. stood outside the Riverhead courthouse on Wednesday and opened up a window on his soul.

"Nice message it sends to society," he said of the 2- to 4-year prison sentence that Judge Barbara Kahn had imposed on John White. "As long as you're black and there's a problem at the end of your driveway, you can grab an illegal handgun and shoot someone in the face and get away with it. Well, let's see what happens when Aaron White gets shot and see how the laws are. Let's see what happens now, OK?"

He was "totally disappointed" with the sentence, the father said.

"It's all about poor Mister White, the hard-working man, meticulous man, who kept up his garden and who forgot about all the rounds of ammunition in his, in his -- nightstand," the angry father went on, before trailing off in a string of expletives.

"Obviously," he said, "it's your high-priced lawyers that represent you who are in the pockets of the judge. OK? That's what it's all about. Suffolk County is corrupt."

As the father spoke, showing his least gracious nature at his most trying moment, it was impossible not to think of the son at the edge of the White family driveway 19 months ago, looking for a piece of Aaron White. The intergenerational parallels shouted as loudly as Daniel Cicciaro Sr. did.

The father's courthouse outburst came as a small surprise, after some early indications that the two families were actually starting to feel for each other. John White made clear that he felt a powerful remorse over the young life he had taken. Various Cicciaros made sympathetic comments toward White, saying the day after the verdict that they were ready to forgive.

Yes, in the end, it's in the grays of the story where the judgments are rendered - not the black and the white.

What a healing moment had just been squandered.

What an unflattering legacy had been left for a son.

And as raw emotion echoed from Riverhead all across Long Island, there was no indication that this secondary verdict is about to change.

Yesterday morning, Cicciaro-the-father came out of his house in Port Jefferson Station and spoke in a calmer tone. But he displayed not an ounce of new insight. Truly, there are no winners in this life-changing drama. Truly, these two tragic families, one black and one white, are locked together forever in their loss and their pain.

His outburst "obviously wasn't a death threat" against John White's son, he said. "I was just reiterating that what if the tables were turned, how would this have unfolded?"

Cooler heads may prevail one day in this house of grieving. But they weren't prevailing yet.