Jonathan Hernández, a member of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang, pleaded guilty to two brutal homicides in New York .
Hernández, aged 24, and other gang members beat Michael Johnson (29) with a baseball bat, stabbed him with a knife and took turns attacking him with a machete in an attack on 24 January 2016, prosecutors said. Three months later, Hernández also helped kill Óscar Acosta, a 19-year-old teenager.
“It is evident from these incomprehensible crimes that the members of the MS-13 have no respect for human life and its violence has no limits”
Rodney Harrison, Suffolk County Police Commissioner
“It is evident from these incomprehensible crimes that the members of the MS-13 have no respect for human life and their violence has no limits”, said the Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison.
Before Johnson’s death, MS leaders-13 they had marked him as “food”, meaning they planned to kill him because they thought he was a member of a rival gang. As a result, he was lured to a wooded area in Brentwood where he was brutally attacked, authorities said.
The same thing happened with Acosta. Gang members put him in the trunk of a car and then took him near an abandoned psychiatric hospital and then into the woods in Brentwood, where they killed him. The body was buried in a shallow grave. His hands and feet were bound.
Hernández faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Authorities have yet to say when he will be sentenced after pleading guilty, Pix.
Last month, Erasmo Humberto Lima Martínez, alias “Tun Tun”, another member of the dangerous gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), committed suicide in a federal prison in Brooklyn.
Long Island and Queens are the two areas with the greatest presence of Mara Salvatrucha in the US, where they are attributed dozens of murders and disappearances. The group is associated with recruiting young men and women, mostly of Latino origin.