The incident began with the trash-talking, in-your-face taunting that has become so common at nearly all levels of sport. The heckling started during the fifth inning of a Big League game (a division of the Little League for 16-to 18-year-olds) between the mostly white Castro Valley team and the racially mixed team from neighboring areas, the Ashland Americans. When a few Castro Valley fans jeered and shouted profanity and racial slurs at Ashland players, umpire Robert Lloyd, 45, called time out and told them to cool off. "Everything seemed to calm down," recalls Ronald Morris, the Castro Valley coach. The game was completed—Castro Valley edging Ashland, 8-7—without further incident, and Matteucci went down to the field to congratulate his friends.
But as the Ashland team was leaving the field, a heckler resumed his needling, and players from both teams exchanged angry words. "It was like throwing a hand grenade," says Morris. "Things just went wild all of a sudden." According to Lt. Ted Nelson of the Alameda County Sheriffs Department, Ashland catcher Antonio John Messina, 18, stripped off his baseball jersey and grabbed an aluminum bat when some Castro Valley fans started moving toward him threateningly. By this time, spectators had poured onto the field, some trying to separate the antagonists, others joining the fray. "Messina started talking trash, like 'Hey, you want somma this?' He swung [the bat] at a heckler, the heckler ducked, and he hit Joey in the back of the head," recalls Morris, "[joey] was trying to get out of the way of the fight."
As Matteucci crumpled to the ground, Messina dropped the bat and ran. Two of Matteucci's friends went after him. One of them hit him in the head with a rock; the other beat his leg with a bat. He too crumpled to the ground unconscious, and within 30 minutes both injured boys were rushed to nearby Eden Hospital. Not knowing what had happened at the game, their tearful mothers waited anxiously together in the hospital.
That morning, Matteucci had taken his mother, Alexandra, 47, out for a belated Mother's Day brunch. "We had a very special closeness," Alexandra says of her only child. "We'd laugh a lot together." Matteucci was a happy kid who enjoyed tooling around in a 1967 Chevy Nova, had fallen in love for the first time and was getting good at picking rock and roll on his bass guitar. Says Alexandra, who was divorced from Joe's father, Gerald, 49, when their son was 18 months old: "People loved him. He was just beginning to blossom."
Messina, after a few false starts, was beginning to blossom too. A high school dropout and father of two, "T.J." was going to night school for his high school diploma. He had been laid off from his job as a grocery clerk but was about to begin work at Taco Bell to help support his girlfriend "and children. "T.J. was so responsible, I'd turn over leadership of the team to him when I had to go to Naval Reserve duty," says Ashland coach Michael Maderos. "He was intense about his baseball. He was intense about life."
After 4½ hours of waiting for word of her son's condition, Terry Messina de la Luz was told that Messina was critically injured but would probably fully recover. Matteucci, however, never regained consciousness and died three days later.
Messina, who was moved to a prison ward at Oakland's Highland Hospital, has been charged with murder. The boy who hit him with a rock was arrested, then released. "He used reasonable force against a fleeing murderer," explains Alameda Deputy District Attorney Matthew Golde.
In the aftermath, everyone involved in the incident seemed to be on the losing side. The home of umpire Lloyd, who had identified the rock-thrower for police, was set afire. Fearing a cycle of retaliation, Ashland coach Maderos made the painful decision to disband the team he founded two years ago to help keep older teenagers off the streets. "I don't know what it is about boys that age," he says sorrowfully. "They get so angry." Messina's mother, of course, was devastated both by Matteucci's death and the damage T.J. had done to himself. "I know my son never meant to harm anyone," she says. "I feel for Joe's parents." And Alexandra Matteucci is struggling with her own grief and her feelings toward the boy who killed her child. "I almost feel sorry for him," she says. "I couldn't hate him. Hating leads to violence, and that's what killed my son."
MARILYN ACHIRON
DORIS BACON in Castro Valley
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