A Mosque Invisible to Many Is a Target
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Published: September 3, 2010
WATERPORT, N.Y. — The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come.
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And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosqueÂ’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.
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“Me and a couple of friends were going to a friend’s house,” Anthony Ogden, 18, one of the teenagers arrested, said Wednesday, “and we went down that road where the supposed mosque is, beeping the horn, trying to get them to chase us. We were looking for fun, you know, the wrong kind of fun.”
Mr. Ogden, who is going into the 10th grade but is very likely not returning to high school this year,
said he had heard it was a cult house where people drank blood. “How many real religious places do you see that do not have a sign stating that it’s a religious place?” he asked.
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‘I’m a good Christian kid; I go to church every Sunday,’ ” Mr. Scott said Mr. Vendetti told him, adding that two of his brothers were also in the military.
But in the car that allegedly hit Mr. Bell, there was panic. Dylan Phillips, 18, drove around wildly, Mr. Huzair said, at one point nearly striking Mr. Bell, who was there with a tree branch he had brought from the mosque.
