Killers show remorse in court

2 gang members get 35 years each in friend’s slaying

Shackled at his ankles and handcuffed in front, Cristian Alexander Zamora spoke in a quivering voice, addressing in Spanish the parents of the teenager he brutally killed in 2013.

“Every night I think about the things that took me to the extreme of taking the life of someone so close to me,” he said.

“I know it should never have happened,” he said, pausing as the boy’s mother, seated behind him in the federal courtroom gallery, burst into jagged sobs, “how I would like to go back.”

He asked the victim’s parents and his own parents to forgive him.

A few minutes later, Zamora would shudder with tears as his former friend’s mother told him, in Spanish, before the judge, “I forgive you from the bottom of my heart, as a human being and as a son of God.”

Zamora, 24, of Huntsville, and Ricardo Leonel Campos Lara, 20, of Houston, each was sentenced to 35 years in federal prison Friday for the gang-ordered killing of a 16-year-old Klein Forest High School student in the Sam Houston National Forest. Both men emigrated from El Salvador, as did the victim’s family.

The pair pleaded guilty last April to aiding and abetting in the near-decapitation of their friend and fellow MS-13 gang member, Josael Guevara, with a machete. Both defendants cooperated with government investigators to the extent that Deputy Chief U.S. Attorney Mark E. Donnelly asked the judge to sentence them to significantly less than life without parole, the standard term under federal guidelines for premeditated murder.

U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. abided by the prosecutor’s recommendation, which also had been approved by the victim’s family.

Before handing down the sentences in the emotionally wrought two-hour court

hearing Friday, Werlein told each of the men they had committed a “particularly brutal, savage murder,” and explained that 35 years for men as young as they are was “a very lenient sentence that takes into consideration your cooperation with the government.”

Another alleged attacker, Jose Leonel Bonilla-Romero, 20, faces a homicide trial in state district court in Walker County. He was 17 at the time of his arrest and was classified as a juvenile, although the court subsequently ruled he should be tried as an adult.

Zamora, Lara and Bonilla-Romero had been friends with the victim, and his parents told the judge in their victim impact statements one of their son’s killers lived with their family for a time. Then the trio received an order — from top-level gang members in El Salvador by way of the Mara Salvatrucha clique in Virginia — that they had to kill Guevara and make a lesson of it. The gang bosses thought Guevara had betrayed MS13 and shared information about the organization with Salvadoran police.

Lara’s attorney, Tom Berg, told the judge his client sat on the order for two weeks, knowing “literally there was a death sentence on Mr. Lara at this point” if he didn’t go through with it.

The teenagers knew well the impunity with which the gang unleashed violence, their lawyers said.

“From the time of his earliest memories, his family was being harassed by the MS-13 gang,” Zamora’s lawyer, Peter Bray, of the federal public defender’s office, said of his client.

At age 10, Zamora saw his older brother shot dead by gang members in the street. In middle school, gang members threw acid on Zamora and knocked his teeth out. When his family resettled in Texas, the same gang pressured him to join.

“He saw MS-13 as an absolutely violent organization that would not take no for an answer,” Bray said. “It was relentless.”

Bray told the judge that the decision the defendants made did not seem like a choice to them.

“My client is filled with a deep and haunting regret for what he’s done,” he said.

They drove Guevara to the national forest, near Huntsville, where they drank some beers and then struck him with a baseball bat. They proceeded to mutilate him with a machete, making it especially gruesome so they could send pictures to El Salvador. Police learned of Guevara’s body from an anonymous 911 call.

Since the crime happened on federal property, law enforcement pursued charges in federal court.

Zamora and Lara know their cooperation with police has made them targets. Lara has been in isolation at the federal detention center in Houston for his own safety, Berg said.

According to their lawyers, it was a price they were willing to pay.