NYPD hunts for suspect in immigrant's death

The defendant in a suspected hate crime murder of an Ecuadorean immigrant in Brooklyn was ordered held without bail Thursday as police pressed the search for his accomplice.

They said that man is an ex-convict captured on video laughing it up just 19 minutes after he used a baseball bat to pummel the victim.

Keith Phoenix, 28, of the Bronx, has been described by police as the one who used the aluminum bat to strike Jose Sucuzhanay repeatedly in the body and head in a confrontation in Bushwick on Dec. 7, a month after Marcelo Lucero, another Ecuadorean, was stabbed to death in Patchogue.

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes met Thursday at the scene of Sucuzhanay's attack with Lucero's family.

The seven teens charged in that slaying made a sport of harassing and battering Latino men in and around Patchogue, Suffolk prosecutors say.

"We come here to show our solidarity," said Lucero's mother, Rosario Lucero, 59, who is visiting from Ecuador. "We don't hurt anyone. We leave our families and our children behind to come to this country to work. We have a right to live."

Sucuzhanay, 31, a real estate agent, died five days after he was beaten.

Police are still looking for Phoenix, and yesterday they released video that shows him in the cash lane at a Robert F. Kennedy Bridge toll booth. Phoenix has already served four years for an attempted robbery conviction.

He's smiling and laughing, apparently while chatting with a man in the passenger seat. He hands over cash to the attendant, gets his change, then appears to hand it over to someone in the backseat.

"It's just a matter of time before we get Phoenix," Hynes said.

Police said the victim and his brother, Romel, were walking home after attending a church party when Phoenix and Hakim Scott, 25, got out of their sport utility vehicle. Apparently believing the brothers were gay, the attackers shouted anti-gay and anti-Hispanic slurs.

Then, police said, Scott smashed a beer bottle over the back of Sucuzhanay's head and chased his brother, while Phoenix grabbed an aluminum bat from the vehicle and beat Jose.

Scott was arrested Tuesday near his Bronx home, charged with second-degree murder and made a full confession, police said.

"Thank God we have them behind bars," Sucuzhanay's mother, Julia Quintuna, said from her home in Ecuador, according to the victim's brother, Diego, who called her from New York.

Scott was ordered held without bail Thursday.

Staff writer Rocco Parascandola contributed to this story.