Illegal immigrants from MS-13 gang arrested for teens’ murders
Illegal immigrants from MS-13 gang arrested for teens’ murders
By Shawn Cohen, Emily Saul and Bruce Golding
March 2, 2017 | 7:40pm |
Ten illegal immigrant members of the notorious MS-13 gang — including one who was previously deported — were indicted Thursday in a wave of Long Island violence that included the slaughter of two teenage girls.
Best friends Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, were beaten with baseball bats and hacked with a machete during an attack that began when gang members spotted them walking together in Brentwood.
Nisa’s mom, Elizabeth Alvarado, said she was “very pissed off” to learn the 2016 murder allegedly was committed by illegal immigrants.
“They’re evil. They’re coming over the border, then coming back after they get kicked out,” she said.
“Things should change. It shouldn’t take my daughter’s death.”
The federal indictment also accuses MS-13 members of killing one of their own by stabbing and slashing Jose Pena, 18, for violating their rules — but only after consulting with “gang leadership” in El Salvador, authorities said.
“The brutal murders of Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, and the savage killing of Jose Pena, allegedly committed by these defendants, exemplify the depravity of a gang whose primary mission is murder,” Brooklyn US Attorney Robert Capers said.
Then-President-elect Donald Trump blasted Long Island’s M-13 scourge in an interview for his Time magazine “Person of the Year” profile last year.
“They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,” Trump said.
“They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”
The illegal immigrants indicted Thursday are all from El Salvador or Honduras, and are among 13 people charged with crimes including racketeering and multiple counts of conspiracy to murder.
The defendants — who face up to life in the slammer or the death penalty — include Edwin Antonio “Strong” Amaya-Sanchez, 29, who the feds say is a leader of an MS-13 chapter in El Salvador known as Guanacos Locos Criminales Salvatruchas.
Amaya-Sanchez was deported to El Salvador on March 22, 2010, but had sneaked back into the United States by July 14, 2014, when he allegedly murdered Jose Lainez-Murcia, with whom he had worked at a landscaping company in Kings Park.
Lainez-Murcia was ambushed and shot outside his home “because he was deemed to be ‘chavala,’ or enemy of the MS-13” after bragging that he had assassinated gang members in El Salvador, the feds say.
Amaya-Sanchez was busted when the FBI’s Long Island Gang Task Force spotted him near the landscaping business the following year.
Nisa and Kayla were attacked on the evening of Sept. 13, 2016, following several disputes over social media between Kayla and various MS-13 members and associates, court papers say.
That animosity boiled over into a fight at Brentwood High School, leading the gang to “put a ‘greenlight’ on Cuevas; that is they authorized her to be killed,” according to the feds.
http://nypost.com/2017/03/02/illegal...teens-murders/
