MS-13 member gets life sentence for slayings

A 23-year-old Silver Spring man was sentenced Friday to life in federal prison for participating in gang murders in Annapolis and Frederick. The sentencing hearing concluded his portion of a major racketeering case against several MS-13 members who prosecutors said participated in brutal slayings throughout Maryland.

Oscar Armando Sorto-Romero faced a mandatory life sentence when he came to court on Friday, after jurors convicted him in a monthslong racketeering trial in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. The trial focused on several members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13. Sorto-Romero and other defendants in the case were convicted of participating in the August 2017 murder of 17-year-old Neris Giovani Bonilla, who was found dead in Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis months later.

Federal prosecutors said Sorto-Romero and an accomplice, Annapolis resident Milton Portillo-Rodriguez, planned to kill Bonilla, a “low-level member of the PVLS [Parque Vista Locos Salvatruchas] clique of MS-13” who they suspected had warned a relative that he was a target of the gang.

The two dug a hole before the killing and lured Bonilla to the park, where other MS-13 members then hit him with a hammer and attacked him with a machete before burying him in a “clandestine grave.”

Portillo-Rodriguez is scheduled to be sentenced May 13.

Sorto-Romero also was convicted on murder and racketeering charges for participating in a 2017 Frederick killing. In that incident, a rival gang member was kidnapped by MS-13 members in Silver Spring, held in a Wheaton basement, then brought to a wooded area in Frederick where gang members killed him with a machete. Federal prosecutors said Sorto-Romero had arranged to transport the man to Frederick.

Joya Parada, now 20, was sentenced last month to 50 years in federal prison for participating in the Frederick murder as well as the Wheaton killing of Irvin Orellana, an Annapolis teen who federal prosecutors say was 17 when he was stabbed more than 100 times. Sorto-Romero was found not guilty on charges related to Or ella na’ s killing.

Defense attorneys said in a sentencing memorandum that Sorto-Romero had requested to serve his sentence at La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in El Paso, Texas.