A high-ranking MS-13 gang member pleaded guilty Wednesday to eight savage murders in New York, including the deaths of two high school girls who were pummeled with bats and slashed with a machete in 2016.
Former President Trump remembered the dead high school classmates, Kayla Cuevas, 16, and Nisa Mickens, 15, along with their parents, in his 2018 State of the Union address, during which he urged for tougher border restrictions.
Alexi Saenz, 29, said little as he pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in federal court in Central Islip, Long Island, a stark cry from his 2018 court appearance when he reportedly smiled and joked with two other defendants in front of the girls’ relatives.
Saenz also admitted to his involvement in three other attempted murders, as well as arson, firearms violations, and drug trafficking, the revenues of which were used to purchase firearms, and additional drugs, and make payments to the larger MS-13 gang.
He faces 40 to 70 years in jail when he is convicted, with prosecutors already dropping their intention to seek the capital penalty in the case.
The brutal string of murders in 2016 and 2017 horrified the Long Island community and demonstrated how deeply entrenched the gang’s activities and homicidal capabilities had become in the area.
Kayla’s father, Freddy Cuevas, expressed disappointment outside of court that the death sentence had been abolished.
“He is an animal. “He’s cruel,” Cuevas stated of Saenz. “Hopefully, justice will be served soon, and we can put this all behind us, as far as the families are concerned.”
The two adolescent girls were murdered in a residential neighborhood near an elementary school on September 13, 2016, the day before Mickens’ sixteenth birthday. Her body was discovered on a tree-lined street in Brentwood, while Cuevas’ beaten body was discovered the next day in the wooded backyard of a nearby home.
The two teenagers had been lifelong friends. Their family and friends said they were inseparable and had a common love in basketball.
Cuevas was involved in a series of disagreements with members and associates of MS-13, a violent gang founded in Los Angeles in the 1980s by Central American immigrants, primarily from El Salvador, but which has since spread with disastrous consequences.
Saenz, also known as “Blasty” and “Big Homie,” led Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside, an MS-13 group that operated in Brentwood and Central Islip. Charges are still pending against his brother, Jairo Saenz, who prosecutors claim was the local gang’s second in command.
According to authorities, the conflict erupted when Cuevas and his pals got into a fight with MS-13 members at Brentwood High School. Following that incident, the MS-13 members vowed vengeance on Cueva and were permitted to kill him by Saenz.
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Several MS-13 members then pursued and attacked Cuevas and Mickens, using baseball bats and a machete to strike each of the girls multiple times in the head and body, while Alexi Saenz’s car drove around looking for police.
Following the murders, the group withdrew to Saenz’s home in Central Islip, where they changed clothing and concealed the weapons.
Breon Peace, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, stated that the gang had been “decimated” on Long Island.
“To say that Alexi Saenz’s hands are drenched in blood does not begin to describe the multiple killings and extreme mayhem he directed and committed in one year in Suffolk County,” Mr. Peace stated.
“These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown,” Trump stated, calling for increased border security. “Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter our country as illegal, unaccompanied, alien minors and wound up in Kayla and Nisa’s high school.”
As he visited Long Island, the Republican advocated for the death penalty for Saenz and others arrested in the killings, blaming the violence and gang development on permissive immigration laws.
In addition to Cuevas and Mickens, Saenz admitted to killing six other people, including 15-year-old Javier Castillo, who was befriended by gang members, driven 30 miles to Freeport, and then fatally attacked with a machete in an isolated marsh because he was believed to be a member of the 18th Street gang, one of MS-13’s primary rivals. His buried body was found a year later, in 2017.
Another victim, Oscar Acosta, 19, who was also considered to be an 18th Street gang member, was discovered dead in a forested location near the railroad tracks days after Cuevas and Mickens were killed. He vanished nearly five months ago after leaving his Brentwood home to play soccer.
Esteban Alvarado-Bonilla, 29, was killed by a gunman inside a Central Islip deli in early 2017; Dewann Stacks, 34, was ambushed and beaten to death as he walked along a road in Brentwood near a wooded area that was sometimes used as a gang meeting spot; Marcus Bohannon, 27, was shot in 2016; and Michael Johnson was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in Brentwood in 2016. Saenz’s squad assumed that all of the victims were members of opposing gangs.
Cuevas’ mother became an anti-gang activist following her daughter’s death, but she was tragically killed in 2018 when she was hit by a car during a fight over a memorial commemorating her daughter’s second anniversary. Annmarie Drago, the driver, pled guilty in 2024 to negligent homicide.
Since 2010, indictments charging MS-13 members with over 70 murders in the Eastern District of New York have been issued, resulting in the convictions of dozens of MS-13 leaders and members, according to FOXNEWS.