MS-13 gang leader in New York pleads guilty in case involving 8 murders

The leader of a New York MS-13 gang group pleaded guilty Wednesday to racketeering and weapons charges in a case involving eight homicides.

The 2016 deaths included two high school students who were abducted and beaten to death while walking through their suburban neighborhood on Long Island.

Alexi Saenz entered the plea in federal court in Central Islip. Prosecutors earlier withdrew an attempt to seek the death penalty in the case.

Saenz was charged with ordering the murders of Kayla Cuevas, 16, and Nisa Mickens, 15, lifelong friends and classmates at Brentwood High School who were killed with a machete and a baseball bat.

The students’ deaths have focused the nation’s attention on violence perpetrated by the MS-13 gang during the administration of former President Donald Trump.

The Republican called for the death penalty for Saenz and others arrested in the killings and blamed lax immigration policies for the violence and gang growth while making several visits to Long Island. Cuevas’ mother, Evelyn Rodriguez, was a guest at Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address.

The girls’ deaths raised questions about whether police had been aggressive enough in confronting what was then a serious threat from gangs developing within school zones.

For months in 2016, Hispanic children and young people went missing in Brentwood, a working-class community located 40 miles (64 kilometers) east of New York City.

Following the murders of Cuevas and Mickens, police found the bodies of three other minors in Brentwood, ages 15, 18 and 19, who had been reported missing months earlier.

Police and federal agents arrested dozens of suspected members of the MS-13 gang, or Mara Salvatrucha, a transnational criminal organization believed to have been founded as a street gang in a Los Angeles neighborhood in the mid-1980s by people fleeing the civil war in El Salvador.

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