Gang violence grips area
BRENTWOOD, N.Y. >> Late at night, when helicopters thrum overhead and spotlights beam down onto lawns, many people here know exactly what’s going on.
“You just think, ‘Oh, God, whose child is it now?’” said Stephanie Spezia, a longtime resident of this suburb in the heart of Long Island that’s caught in the grip of a violent street gang with Central American ties, MS-13.
MS-13 has been blamed for a trail of 11 corpses of mostly young people discovered in woods and vacant lots in Brentwood and neighboring Central Islip since the start of the school year.
The bloodshed in the blue-collar towns has gotten the attention of President Donald Trump, who says it’s the result of lax immigration policies that let too many criminal “scum” slip through.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Friday gave a speech about the violence to law enforcement officials near a park where the bodies of four young men were found this month bearing MS-13’s hallmarks: repeated slashes from a blade that left them nearly unrecognizable.
Some parents say they’re afraid to let their children go to school. Teens say any perceived slight to a gang member, especially a refusal to join, can mean death.
After one high school warned parents not to let their kids wear anything gang-affiliated, gang members started deciding on a daily basis what colors were off-limits, leaving students to guess what not to wear.
“Kids are losing their childhoods,” said Jennifer Suarez, whose 15-yearold niece was beaten and hacked to death last year. “You can see the stress on their faces as they get ready. It’s like, you know, they’re suiting up for battle.”
So how does a street gang with ties to Central America gain such an aggressive foothold in the suburbs of Long Island?
MS-13, or the Mara Salvatrucha, is believed by federal prosecutors to have thousands of members across the U.S., primarily immigrants from Central America. It has a stronghold in Los Angeles, where it emerged in the 1980s as a neighborhood street gang.
But its true rise began after members were deported back to El Salvador in the 1990s. There, the gang thrived and spread to Honduras. MS-13 and rival groups there now control entire towns, rape girls and young women, massacre students, bus drivers and merchants who refuse to pay extortion and kill competitors.
That violence has prompted a migration of people trying to escape, especially children, who have streamed north because of a U.S. policy allowing people under 18 who arrive without parents to stay in the country temporarily with relatives or friends.
Since the fall of 2013, the U.S. has placed 165,000 unaccompanied minors. Long Island has been a frequent landing spot. Suffolk County, which includes Brentwood and Central Islip, has gotten 4,500. Neighboring Nassau County has received 3,800.
Sessions, speaking at a courthouse in Central Islip, said he believes gang members used this system to come north, too.
“Bad guys know how the system works, and they have exploited it,” he said.
He later met with parents of some of the teenagers killed.
In a recent roundup of 13 MS-13 gang suspects accused of murder and other crimes, seven had entered as unaccompanied minors.