Derek Hawkins, Washington Post, May 9, 2016

A jury on Monday convicted six MS-13 gang members in connection with three brutal murders and an attempted murder in Northern Virginia, delivering an across-the-board verdict in a sweeping federal case against the violent street gang.

After less than two full days of deliberations, jurors found that the gang members played various roles in the stabbing and dismembering of two men, the fatal shooting of another, and a failed plot to kill a fellow gang member.

The verdict is a victory for prosecutors, who initially charged 13 people, all of them members of a clique known as the Park View Locos Salvatruchas, under a law once used to fight the Mafia. Six defendants pleaded guilty before trial and testified against the others. One defendant is being tried separately.

“Extreme violence is the hallmark of MS-13, and these horrific crimes represent exactly what the gang stands for,” U.S. Attorney Dana J. Boente of the Eastern District of Virginia said in a statement.

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Sentencing will take place over the summer. All defendants face mandatory life imprisonment.

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The case dates back to October 2013, when prosecutors said several of the defendants plotted to kill a member believed to be cooperating with police.

Authorities intercepted them in Woodbridge one night as they were driving to Gar-Field High School, where the member, known only as Peligroso, took night classes. They found two machetes and a sawed-off shotgun in their car.

A week later, gang members killed Nelson Omar Quintanilla Trujillo, who was suspected of alerting police to the failed murder plot, prosecutors said. After luring Trujillo into Holmes Run Park in Fairfax County, they stabbed him to death, dismembered him and buried him in the woods. Several months later, they stabbed and decapitated Gerson Adoni Martinez Aguilar, an MS-13 recruit who was accused of stealing gang money and having sex with an incarcerated member’s girlfriend. They buried him in the same park.

The third murder took place in June 2014, when Chavez and two other gang members shot and killed Julio Urrutia in Alexandria, mistaking him for a rival gang member, according to the prosecutors.

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Prosecutors presented no forensic evidence connecting the defendants to the crimes. Instead, they built the case almost entirely on testimony from cooperating defendants and a confidential FBI informant who secretly recorded hundreds of phone calls with the gang over the course of a year.

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Prosecutors presented numerous recordings they said include gang members taking credit for the killings. {snip}

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Others argued that the defendants were merely falsely bragging to a senior gang member when they talked with Junior about their roles in the slayings. {snip}

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MS-13 has operated in the Washington region since the early 1990s and has between 2,000 and 3,000 members in the area, according to gang experts.

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