Butchers’ brutal toll on Long Island

NOTHING was left of 20-year-old Michael Banegas’ face after he was killed by MS-13 members.

His killers had forced him to kneel and tied a plastic bag around his head. Suffocation was the cause of death.

But Banegas’ mutilated body, found with those of three other young men in a Central Islip park in April, told a story of the gang’s savagery.

Hacked with a machete, his face had no nose, no lips, no cheeks; it was just a mass of bloody tissue and broken bones. It’s unclear if Banegas was butchered before or after he died.

The second victim was his cousin Jefferson Villalobos, who was just shy of his 19th birthday. The killers had left half his face, but his uncle could identify the corpse only from a tattoo on its arm — an image of praying hands clutching a rosary with the phrase, “In God’s hands.”

The face of the youngest of the victims, Justin Llivicura, 16, was also hacked with a machete. His family noticed one of his ears was severed when they saw a video of the bodies sent to them by members of the gang.

The fourth body has been identified as that of another teen, Jorge Tigre, 18.

“I can’t talk about it anymore,” Banegas’ mother, Lourdes, told The Post when asked about the murder of her son and nephew.

Villalobos, of Florida, had been visiting Banegas’ family. The two grew up together in a town in Honduras and played in soccer leagues there before immigrating to the US in 2014.

“They weren’t part of the gang,” said a woman who identified herself as a cousin of the two men. “They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In September, the bodies of best friends Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, were found a day apart in neighboring Brentwood. Both had been hacked and beaten. Four reputed MS-13 members have been charged in their murders.