Suspects indicted in slayings of three teenagers
in the United States illegally, including most of the people directly implicated in the killings.
Last December, Donald Trump referenced the slayings in Brentwood during a profile for his Time magazine Person of the Year award after being elected president.
Two other killings of Brentwood youths, ages 15 and 19, whose bodies were discovered last year in secluded spots in the hamlet, remain unsolved.
Gang violence has been a problem in Brentwood and some surrounding Long Island communities for more than a decade, but Suffolk County police and the FBI began pouring resources into a crackdown after the killings of the high school girls sparked outrage.
Cuevas was targeted last summer by a group of four gang members, including two juveniles, because she had been feuding with MS-13 members at school and on social media. The posse, which had been roving in a car looking for gang enemies, attacked it they came across her walking with Mickens in the street.
Nisa “was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging out with her childhood friend,” U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said.
Pena-Hernandez was a MS-13 gang member who was lured to a wooded area by fellow gang members he thought were his friends, Capers said. Those friends turned on him and repeatedly stabbed him to death, he said.
The gang, also called Mara Salvatrucha, is believed to have been founded as a neighborhood street gang in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s by immigrants fleeing a civil war in El Salvador. It grew after some members were deported to El Salvador, helping to turn that country into one of the most violent places in the world. It’s now a major international criminal enterprise with tens of thousands of members in several Central American countries and many U.S. states.