As a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer was on his way to the coal region to scout ideas for a film about working-class America, all hell was breaking loose in Shenandoah.
David Turnley remembered the call he received en route from New York City to Schuylkill County.
"As I was heading to the coal region, a friend of mine called and said, 'You should go to Shenandoah, Pa., where four of the town's star sons, all straight-A students and football players, have been charged with killing an undocumented Mexican immigrant," Turnley recalled. "I thought, 'Well, I guess I should go to Shenandoah.' "
He stayed two years, filming, shooting photographs and documenting the events surrounding the beating death of Luis Eduardo Ramirez Zavala.
Turnley is planning to release "Shenandoah: The Story of a Working Class Town and the American Dream on Trial" sometime this fall. He called the documentary a "humanly dramatic, compelling and tragic story."
The 97-minute film isn't meant to sway people's thinking about the July 12, 2008, fight, Ramirez's death two days later or the events that followed, Turnley said.
"The truth is I didn't have an axe to grind with anyone on either side of this," he said.
Even a balanced report, however, may be too much for some in Shenandoah, according to borough officials contacted for this story, including those in elected, volunteer, business and clergy positions. They aren't so sure the borough has had time to recover from publicity received from news outlets around the world.
"The media destroyed the town and I'm not interested in reliving all of that," said one official, who declined to be named.
Another community official said the borough was beginning to heal from years of strife. The documentary will set the process back, she predicted, by pouring "a whole lot of salt" on the wounds.
The two officials were among the majority of those contacted by the Standard-Speaker who declined to comment on the documentary, or did so and then requested anonymity. Some knew families of the accused, others audibly sighed when the case was mentioned and others didn't return messages left for them.
Shenandoah Main Street Manager Mary Luscavage apologized, saying she had "no idea" what to expect from the film and declined further comment. And Phil Andras, principal of the Shenandoah Valley School District's middle and high schools, said he didn't feel comfortable commenting on a documentary he hadn't watched.
Change of course
Turnley originally planned to visit the area for a glimpse of a contemporary American working-class community during the 2008 presidential election. After almost three decades of covering major news stories in more than 75 countries, his goal was to find a patriotic community whose residents still clung to their ethnic roots.
And having heard from his father and grandfather about the tough men who came from the coal region and played an equally tough game of football, Turnley also wanted to find a place that loved its hometown team.
"I decided one Saturday that I'd drive over to the coal region, drive around and find a town to spend a year of my life in," said Turnley, whose previous assignments included covering the fall of communism and wars in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf.
During the three-hour trip, word came that Shenandoah teenagers Derrick Donchak, Brandon Piekarsky, Brian Scully and Colin Walsh were suspects in Ramirez's death.
Turnley steered to Shenandoah, knowing the scope of his documentary would change.
"I found myself in the midst of a town that was going through something very challenging," he said.
After talking to customers inside a local doughnut shop, Turnley flicked on the news and caught an interview with Walsh's father.
"When he spoke to the reporter about his son and when you listened to him talk, he was obviously heartbroken by what happened. He was shattered. Nothing made sense to him because his son never made problems for him," he said.
Turnley wanted to understand what happened, why it happened. He wanted to understand why good people can hate - and whether they have the potential to change, he said.
For footage, he spent a season with the Shenandoah Valley High School football team. He attended community events. He followed the teen suspects' trials and the trials of police officers accused of lying or filing false police reports during the investigation.
It has been just under two years since Donchak and Piekarsky were sentenced to nine years in federal prison for violating Ramirez's rights under the federal Fair Housing Act. The two were acquitted in 2009 of third-degree murder charges in Schuylkill County Court but convicted of the federal charges in 2010.
Scully was prosecuted by Schuylkill County juvenile authorities for his role in the assault. Walsh pleaded guilty to violating Ramirez's rights under the Fair Housing Act and was sentenced to 55 months in prison.
Former Shenandoah police Chief Matthew R. Nestor was convicted of filing a false police report and former Lt. William Moyer was charged with lying to the FBI in regard to the Ramirez investigation.
Film's approach
Turnley declined to name who he interviewed for the documentary, but a promotional trailer for the documentary shows an interview with Scully. It also includes shots of Ramirez's children at home with their mother in Shenandoah and at his grave in Mexico.
The two-minute, 35-second trailer, found here, also includes an anti-illegal immigration rally held at a borough park, a unity march held on the borough's main streets and workers eating at a Main Street Mexican restaurant.
Turnley hopes viewers will find the film presents an opportunity to think about the country, the working class and immigration.
He's hoping to debut it at a "major" film festival sometime over the next few months, he said. He also plans to schedule a local showing.
"I want to thank the town. The people were so gracious to open their lives to me," he said.
Had the Ramirez incident not occurred, Turnley said he is confident he still would have found Shenandoah and stayed.
"It's a really beautiful town," he said, recalling his first views from atop a hill. He saw the golden domes of Byzantine chapels stretching toward the sky and dwarfing neat blocks of row homes. "It was almost like no other place in America. It looked like a European hamlet from above."
And for the record, Turnley said the stories he heard growing up were true.
"The coal region does play tough football," he said.
Turnley made "Shenandoah" in association with Epic Match Media, Louverture Films, Netflix and executive producers Danny Glover, Billy Peterson, Joslyn Barnes and Ted Sarandos.
More information on the movie can be found on the website or by visiting the Facebook page.
Turnley is also an author of seven books, the most recent of which, "Mandela: In Times of Struggle and Triumph," is a 20-year anthology of photographs that depict the unraveling of apartheid and the life of Nelson Mandela. He also directed and produced the Emmy-nominated documentary "The Dalai Lama: At Home and in Exile" for CNN. Another full-length documentary, "La Tropical," was filmed in Cuba.
He won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage the world's political upheaval in 1989, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square protests in China.