Law enforcement efforts a year after 4 suspected MS-13 killings

Federal and local authorities have arrested and deported hundreds of suspected MS-13 members since four young men were killed in the woods behind a Central Islip soccer field a year ago Wednesday, a crime that thrust the community with a large Central American population into the national debate over immigration.

The slayings became the catalyst for new law enforcement strategies designed to take down the gang, officials said. Authorities said those strategies and social programs aimed at steering youths away from MS-13 have had some success. However, law enforcement said the challenge is constant.

“Though we may have decimated some cliques, MS-13 is still alive and we don’t want them to regain a foothold in any of the communities where we have weeded them out,” said Suffolk County Police Department Chief of Detectives Gerard Gigante.

Suffolk police, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies responded to suspected gang killings by beefing up their presence in Central Islip, Brentwood and other Long Island communities where MS-13 is active. State and county leaders, meanwhile, have poured millions of dollars into social services and gang-intervention programs aimed at eliminating MS-13’s most important asset, its recruits.

The 2019 budget approved by state lawmakers includes $16 million for social service programs to combat gangs in Nassau and Suffolk, including $3 million to Catholic Charities for case management of unaccompanied immigrant children who move to Long Island and are vulnerable to MS-13 recruitment. Suffolk County has also earmarked $500,000 for anti-gang programs run by STRONG Youth, a Uniondale community development organization. The county has also designated nearly $800,000 between September 2016 and June 2018 for GIVE, an anti-gun-violence program, and $500,000 over the next two years for Project Safe Neighborhoods, an anti-gang program.

“We came to the conclusion that this is not a problem that can be solved through traditional law enforcement alone,” County Executive Steve Bellone said. “We have to create a community of support around these vulnerable kids this organization is preying on.”

A superseding federal racketeering indictment unsealed last month charged four men who prosecutors said are MS-13 members — Alexis Hernandez, Santos Leonel Ortiz-Flores, Omar Antonio Villalta and Edwin Diaz — with the quadruple homicide. Six youths have also been charged, according to court records. Attorneys for the four identified defendants declined to comment. All suspects have pleaded not guilty.

Suffolk County acting Police Commissioner Stuart Cameron said some of the killers were just kids themselves.

“They murdered somebody that night and they were back sitting in a high school class the next day,” Cameron said. “It’s just hard to fathom that.”

Michael Lopez Banegas, 20, Jorge Tigre, 18, Jefferson Villalobos, 18, and Justin Llivicura, 16, were found dead in the woods behind a Central Islip soccer field. The April 11, 2017, slayings made Central Islip synonymous with MS-13, just as neighboring Brentwood had become associated with suburban gang violence seven months earlier, after members of the criminal organization allegedly killed high school students Kayla Cuevas, 16, and Nisa Mickens, 15.

Carlos Lopez, the father of Michael Lopez Banegas, said the family’s searing pain pushed them out of their neighborhood and into a new home in Bay Shore, where they erected a shrine dedicated to Michael, with sports trophies, posthumous awards and flowers. The last photograph of Lopez’s deceased son hangs on another wall. It was taken by Lopez Banegas’ girlfriend and it shows him feeding birds in a Patchogue soccer field.

“I know I’ll never get him back,” Lopez said. “At least those people won’t do this to other families. To other kids.”

Suffolk police have made 330 arrests of 220 individuals since the Brentwood murders in September 2016, according to District Attorney Timothy Sini, the county’s police commissioner until early January. Suffolk law enforcement authorities have also worked with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to deport more than 100 suspected MS-13 members from the United States. Central Islip Coalition of Good Neighbors president Debbie Cavanagh said the increased police presence has been noticeable.

“The police department has stepped up, the FBI has stepped up, ICE has stepped up,” Cavanagh said. “The federal government is in these communities now. I think that has helped a lot.”

But Martha Maffie, executive director of SEPA Mujer, a women’s group that works with undocumented and other immigrant members of the community, fears overzealous policing may be resulting in the arrest of innocent people.

“We want the people who commit crimes to be arrested so we can be safe,” she said. “The problem here is they are [the police] committing a lot of arrests of people that aren’t affiliated with the gangs or MS-13.”

Sometimes communication between the police and the community pays off, officials and activists say. In one instance, Suffolk plainclothes detectives flooded the area around Brentwood High School last year after community members told police about MS-13 members who were harassing and assaulting young men, officials said. Officers arrested three gang members and two associates as they were trying to force a victim into a vehicle. The gang members told police they planned to kill the young man because he belonged to a rival gang, according to court filings.

President Donald Trump cited the MS-13 slayings during a July speech in Brentwood, describing some Long Island neighborhoods as “bloodstained killing fields” and suggested that officers treat suspects more roughly.

Trump said, “Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head — the way you put the hand over — like don’t hit their head, and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head? I said, ‘You can take the hand away, OK.’ ”

Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to Central Islip weeks after the murders, where he vowed to “demolish” MS-13 during a speech at the Alfonse M. D’Amato United States Courthouse.

In May 2017, federal officials launched “Operation Matador,” an initiative designed to arrest and deport MS-13 leaders and recruits, as well as members of other gangs, officials said.

The initiative, launched by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations, has led to 475 arrests, most of whom were confirmed gang members or affiliates, officials said.

Nassau County had 210 Operation Matador arrests and Suffolk County has the second most, with 177, officials said. Their latest operation on Thursday netted 24 individuals, authorities said. Of the 475 arrests, 274 were MS-13 members, officials said.

The tough talk and arrests are of little consolation to Jorge Tigre’s mother, Bertha Ullaguari, who has been suffering with depression since her son’s death. She said she felt especially distraught when she saw her child’s alleged killers in court.

“They looked at me like they didn’t do anything,” Ullaguari said. “They are laughing, making jokes. I felt so sad. They are still alive. They still get to see their family. Me? I’ll never get to see my son again.”

Court documents say Tigre, a Bellport High School senior who wanted to be a police officer, and his friends, were targeted by MS-13 because they had disrespected the gang and belonged to a rival organization. But only one of the four victims was friendly with MS-13 members and associates and was the main target, Gigante said. Tigre had angered gang members by trying to distance himself from the group, his family said shortly after the killings. The rest were collateral damage, killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, Gigante said.

On the night of the killings, Tigre, Lopez Banegas, Villalobos and Llivicura met up with two young women who were actually MS-13 associates, court records show. They were joined by a fifth friend, an immigrant from El Salvador. The group went into the woods behind the Central Islip Community Park, an area where local teens have gone for many years to drink beer and smoke marijuana.

More than a dozen MS-13 members armed with bats, knives and the gang’s trademark machetes — including Diaz, Hernandez, Ortiz Flores and Villalta, whose nickname was “Anticristo” — were lurking in the woods, according to court documents. The women notified the gang members via text that they had taken the five young men to a large fallen tree near a fence.

When the armed MS-13 members emerged from the darkness and surrounded the young men, the immigrant from El Salvador was able to escape. Tigre, Lopez Banegas, Llivicura and Villalobos were not as quick. They were soon “engulfed in a horrific frenzy of violence as they were brutally bludgeoned, sliced and stabbed to death,” court documents said.

“What stands out to me is the violence,” Gigante said. “The fact that somebody would whack somebody with a machete and just dismember them.”

Villalobos’ father said the people who killed his son should pay.

“They need to be in prison and to never get out,” said Francis Villalobos. “They need to be punished within the law.”

The groundwork necessary to solve the quadruple homicide began months before September 2016, when Brentwood High School students Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens were slain.

Suffolk police had already been working with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies for months when the four bodies were found in the Central Islip woods, officials said.

Local and federal law enforcement officials teamed up to search for missing people last seen — through witness interviews and surveillance video — with MS-13 members, according to Gigante. During that time, police officials noticed an uptick in gang violence that included attacks with machetes — MS-13’s weapon of choice.

Then in September 2016, the bodies of Mickens and Cuevas were discovered, along with the skeletal remains of other missing people believed to be MS-13 victims.

The investigations into those killings and disappearances gave Suffolk detectives and their federal law enforcement partners a pool of active MS-13 members to question.

Police stepped up enforcement shortly after the girls’ slayings, with more patrols and assigning more officers help solve the case, Cameron said.

Aviation units did flyovers on large wooded areas that were difficult for officers to patrol. And if gang members were seen meeting in those areas, ground forces were sent in to flush them out, Cameron said.

Investigators worked to gather intelligence on the gang and find those who were responsible for the slayings. Officials conducted 17 State Liquor Authority raids on known MS-13 hangouts like bars and restaurants and had them shut down.

But despite all that has happened, the victims’ families say they remain trapped in their pain.

Marcelo Llivicura, the father of Justin Llivicura, said nothing has changed for him since he received the heartbreaking news that his son was killed. “We’re still very sad,” Llivicura said. “I will never forget the death of my son.”