More than four years after the brutal murder of fifteen-year-old Lesandro “Junior” Guzmán Feliz with machetes in a warehouse in the Bronx (NYC), two new sentences were handed down yesterday.
Diego Suero (33) and Frederick Then (24), “Trinitarios” gang leaders, were sentenced on Friday for second-degree murder in the attack captured by security cameras, on 20 June 2018.
“I will never forgive you for having decided to murder my son. You are and will always be a danger to society (…) My hope is that another family never has to live with the pain of losing a child,” the victim’s father, Lisandro Guzmán, said at the time in court.
The murder launched an international movement on social networks under the hashtag #justiceforjunior that sought justice for the teenager attacked by gang members armed with machetes and knives in the middle of the street, and who ran bleeding to collapse in a hospital in The Bronx.
His Dominican mother, Leandra Feliz, became the face of mourning and has since been advocating for a bill to install panic buttons in all New York warehouses. “My son has already passed away,” she said last year. “They killed my son. We have to protect our future children and our community.”
At the time of the crime, Feliz worked as a housekeeper in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Barnabas Hospital, the same one where her son was declared dead.
A total of 15 men were charged in connection with Guzman’s brutal stabbing, including two who became cooperating witnesses with the prosecution.
In New York, the interior and surroundings of warehouses are often crime scenes, both robberies and homicides. Until the beginning of July 39 robberies had been reported in NYC warehouses in 2022, according to the police.
Attacks are common to employees, customers and neighbors. In January, a woman and her pit bull were killed in a shooting inside a Brooklyn grocery store. At the end of November, a young man aged 20 died after being shot several times, while he was a client of a warehouse in Staten Island (NYC). And in October an immigrant store clerk was stabbed to death in East Harlem, in an apparent argument over 50 cents off the price of a cigarette.