Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘HE HAD ALL HIS LIFE AHEAD OF HIM’
BROWARD TEEN, 3 OTHERS DIED AT GANG’S HANDS, COPS SAY
Former Deerfield Beach High School soccer player Jefferson Villalobos was looking forward to an Easter week vacation with family in New York, far from his South Florida home and farther still from violence that once surrounded him in his native Honduras.
But the family holiday turned to tragedy Wednesday night. Villalobos was among four men savagely murdered near a wooded Long Island City park in what authorities said has all
“MS-13, part of their trademark, is to prey on recent immigrants.”
the earmarks of the gang-related brutality the 18-year-old hoped to leave behind three years ago in Central America.
“He was such a loving, caring person,” said Keydy Chirinos, 20, one of his closest friends and a former classmate.
She said Villalobos left school in his senior year to take a construction job but still dreamed of going to college.
“He was so young. He had all his life ahead of him,” she said. “It’s just sad.”
Despite a $25,000 cash reward for information in the case, a police spokeswoman said Monday there have been no arrests made in connection with the investigation, which the FBI has joined.
“At this point, all indications
Suffolk County Police Commissioner Timothy Sini
are that this was the work of MS-13,” said Suffolk County Police Commissioner Timothy Sini, at a news conference Friday in Bay Shore, N.Y.
MS-13 is the street gang Mara Salvatrucha, believed responsible for a spate of recent bloody slayings on Long Island. The barbaric nature of the slayings appeared consistent with MS-13’s methods, Sini said.
“MS-13, part of their trademark, throughout the country and not just here, is to prey on recent immigrants,” Sini said. “That is because many times, recent immigrant families are in vulnerable positions.”
Also slain were Long Island residents Justin Llivicura, 16, of East Patchogue; Jorge Tigre, 18, of Bellport; and Michael Lopez Banegas, 20, of Brentwood, identified by relatives as Villalobos’ cousin.
Chirinos said she was also close to Banegas, whom she met during a visit to Long Island in October. They texted daily, she said.
Ana Villalobos, Jefferson Villalobos’ mother, said Sunday she was too distraught to discuss her son’s slaying.
Earlier in the week, Villalobos’ cousin, Yensy Fuentes, told New York’s NBC television affiliate that he came to Long Island with his grandmother to visit family in Brentwood.
Fuentes said her cousin’s face had been mutilated, and that he was identified in part by a tattoo on his arm.
“My uncle, as soon as he saw it, he knew it was him,” Fuentes told the television station. The tattoo depicts two hands wrapped around a rosary with the inscription “In God’s hands.”
Formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants from El Salvador escaping civil war, MS-13 took root in Central America and then bounced back to the United States, according to José Miguel Cruz, director of research at the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami.
South Florida has been largely spared MS-13-style violence, in part because of the large and diverse Latino community here, Cruz theorized.
“South Florida is more supportive of new arrivals, so immigrants may not feel so isolated,” he said.
But gangs such as MS-13 and others have flourished in parts of Virginia, for example, and in Long Island, Cruz said.
Last year, MS-13 was believed to have been responsible for 11 deaths in Suffolk County. Among them were two teenage girls from Brentwood who were murdered with machetes and baseball bats, police said.
Those killings led to the discovery of the skeletal remains of three other teenagers, and the eventual arrest of scores of gang members, police said.