SHENANDOAH, Pa. — Eileen Burke still lives by the epicenter of an outburst of hate. On a summer night in 2008, just outside her door, she heard shouts of things like “you bleeping Mexican.” She saw some young men — two of whom she knew by name — run past. She knelt over a motionless person she saw laying in the street, heard a liquid gurgle in his throat, and realized the man was dying.

But, in the hours and days afterward, Burke said, the local police did not seem interested in her up-close observations of what turned out to be the beating death of an illegal immigrant.

Last week, she digested the news that more than half of the local police department in her small Schuylkill County borough had been arrested by the federal government for crimes that included an alleged cover-up of a racially charged beating death. “It is sickening,” said Burke, a former Philadelphia police officer who moved back to her hometown years ago. “They thought they were going to be untouchable.”

Four of the borough's seven police officers were arrested last week. They included the chief, Matthew Nestor. In addition, two teenagers allegedly involved in the beating were charged with federal hate crimes.

One federal indictment charged Nestor, Shenandoah Police Lt. William Moyer, and Officer Jason Hayes with impeding the investigation into the beating death, which involved white teenagers who had played for the Shenandoah Valley High School football team.

Another indictment, stemming from unrelated events, charged Nestor and Capt. Jamie Gennarini with extortion of cash from illegal gambling operations.

Meanwhile, the press picked up a previously unpublicized story that people in Shenandoah had quietly talked about for years. A civil lawsuit, filed in 2006, claimed borough police had beaten to death a Hispanic teenager, then hung him in his holding cell to make it look like a suicide.

In town last week, reporters asked people on streets and in shops what it was like to see more than the police department under arrest. “It is just horrible when you can’t trust your cops,” said Pat Ritsko, who has worked in a donut shop on Main Street for years. “I know some of them and they are really nice. It is a sad, sad situation.”

Moyer, she said, had been in the donut shop as a customer. “Very nice guy,” she said. “People like him. The kids like him. Well liked. It is just a shocking story.”

A century ago, Shenandoah was a busy coal town. Thousands of immigrants, including Italians, Lithuanians, Polish, and Germans, worked in nearby anthracite mines and raised families. The tight grid of streets was hemmed in by mountains. The population, which once reached 30,000, was so close-packed that "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" dubbed the borough the most congested square mile in the U.S.

Coal mining and other industries declined. The population dropped to about 5,000. In recent years, there was an influx of Spanish-speaking immigrants, and ethnic tensions were on the rise even before the deadly beating of 25-year-old Luis Ramirez on July 12, 2008.

Mexican native Jose Silva has run a used clothing store that caters to Spanish-speaking people for more than two years. The sentiment in his community about the arrest of the police officers, he said, was, “It is about time.”

Silva has three children who attend local schools. He has worked as a coal miner, field hand, and equipment operator. In his shop, he sells used lamps, shirts, coats, and stuffed animals for paltry amounts of money, or just gives them away.

After the 2008 killing, he did an interview with an out-of-town television reporter. After the interview aired, someone broke the window of his shop. Still, he said, “I have a lot of friends. American people. Mexican people. Puerto Rican people.”

Many residents do not want to talk about the federal indictments of the police. “Mum’s the word,” said a retired man in the donut shop.

Another patron, Bill Habel, said the arrest of the cops was “an overreaction.” What they allegedly did, he said, was wrong, but the pursuit of the case against them was fanned by pressure from “minority advocacy groups.”

Habel is a truck driver. He lives in a nearby town and stops at the shop every day to eat lunch. The news media, he said, botched the story from the start because it portrayed the town as filled with nasty racists. And, he said, it failed to report on rumors of less-than-desirable activities involving Ramirez.

At the time of his death, Ramirez was in the U.S. illegally, working at various jobs. On the night of July 12, he became involved in an argument with a group of local high school football players.

Nearly two weeks passed before four teenagers were arrested. Brandon Piekarsky and Derrick Donchak eventually were acquitted in state court of the most serious charges lodged against them. They were convicted of simple assault and given state prison sentences of up to 23 months. Collin Walsh pleaded guilty in federal court to violating the civil rights of Ramirez and testified against Piekarsky and Donchak. A fourth teenager was processed in juvenile court.

Piekarsky and Donchak last week were serving out their state prison sentences when the federal indictments came out. They were charged with federal hate crimes. They could face life in prison if convicted.

The most serious count against the police officers, obstruction, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Burke said that on the night Ramirez was beaten, police cars from four other out-of-town agencies arrived at the scene before any vehicle from the Shenandoah police department.

As Ramirez lay dying in the street, she said, no police tape was put up around the scene.

Local investigators waited about two weeks, she said, before they talked to her in person. As they interviewed her in her living room, she said, the investigators told her that her memory of the events was wrong. “I knew something was up,” she said, “It is the good old boys.”