Man pleads guilty in string of MS-13 killings that stunned New York suburbs

[January 15, 2025]  By PHILIP MARCELO

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — A man who helped lead an MS-13 clique in New York pleaded guilty Tuesday in a federal racketeering case involving seven murders, including the 2016 killings of two high school girls that focused the nation’s attention on the violent Central American street gang.

Jairo Saenz, 28, entered the plea in federal court in Central Islip in a hearing attended by members of his family and some of the victims’ families.

“I did these things and I knew they were wrong,” he said in Spanish through a translator after his lawyer read his accounting of the killings in suburban Long Island, just east of New York City.

Saenz, who is originally from El Salvador, faces 40 to 60 years in prison as part of the plea deal approved by the judge.

Prosecutors said he was the second-in-command in a gang clique known as Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside that quietly terrorized the hamlets of Brentwood and Central Islip for months before a particularly brutal crime on Sept. 13, 2016, made headlines.

Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, lifelong friends and classmates at Brentwood High School, were walking through a quiet neighborhood near their homes when they were killed with a machete and a baseball bat by a group of young men and teenage boys who had stalked them in a car.

More killings followed in the coming months. President Donald Trump blamed the violence and gang growth on lax immigration policies as he made several visits to Long Island, invited Cuevas' mother to his State of the Union address in 2018, and later called for the death penalty for Saenz and others arrested in the killings.

Saenz's brother, Alexi Saenz, the clique’s leader, previously pleaded guilty to similar charges and will be sentenced later this month.

The brothers have admitted they ordered or approved the killings of rivals and others who disrespected or feuded with the clique in order to move up in the MS-13 hierarchy and bolster their group's reputation.

Saenz’s family and lawyers didn’t comment outside court, but the parents of two of the victims said they wished he had been given a life sentence.

A memorial to best friends Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas in Brentwood, N.Y., Sept. 27, 2016, near the spot where their bodies were found. (AP Photo/Claudia Torrens, File)

“It was some justice, but not what I wanted,” said George Johnson, the father of 29-year-old Michael Johnson, who was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in Brentwood in 2016. “At least he’s not out in the street to hurt anybody else.”

Nisa's mother, Elizabeth Alvarado, lamented that her daughter was just a day shy of her 16th birthday when she died.

“That really hurt because she had so many dreams,” Alvarado said outside the courthouse. “She wanted to be a veterinarian. She wanted to be a nurse like me and her dad. There’s just so many things that I’m missing out on.”

Other victims in the case included Javier Castillo, a 15-year-old whom prosecutors say gang members befriended before driving him to a secluded park and attacking him with machetes.

Another victim, Oscar Acosta, 19, was discovered dead in a wooded area near some railroad tracks five months after leaving home to play soccer.

Older victims included Esteban Alvarado-Bonilla, 29, who was killed by a gunman inside a Central Islip deli in early 2017 and Dewann Stacks, 34, who was ambushed and beaten to death as he walked along a road in Brentwood.

Saenz also pleaded guilty Tuesday to his participation in three attempted killings; arson; narcotics trafficking; firearms offenses; and a conspiracy to kill Marcus Bohannon, who was slain by other MS-13 members in 2016.

Acting U.S. Attorney Carolyn Pokorny said in a statement that Saenz took part in “barbaric, and multiple acts of senseless gang violence that had turned parts of Long Island into a war zone” with MS-13 gang members “wielding guns, machetes, bats and fire” in their reign of terror.

“It is my sincere hope that today’s guilty plea brings some measure of solace and closure to the families of the defendant’s victims who continue to mourn the deaths of their loved ones,” she added.

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