Trial set for MS-13 associate charged in quadruple slaying

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — A federal jury will hear opening statements Monday within the trial of a Lengthy Island lady accused of luring 4 younger males to their slaughter by greater than a dozen members of the MS-13 road gang.

Prosecutors say Leniz Escobar helped orchestrate the 2017 bloodbath as a teenage affiliate of the gang earlier than falsely claiming to be a sufferer within the ambush.

Escobar has pleaded not responsible to racketeering expenses within the quadruple slaying that prosecutors described as “a horrific frenzy of violence” involving machetes, knives and tree limbs in a Central Islip park.

A message was despatched to her protection attorneys looking for remark.

MS-13 had been looking for to settle a rating, prosecutors allege, and believed the younger victims to be members of the rival 18th Road Gang. The victims’ households have denied that any of the slain males had been in a gang.

Prosecutors allege that Escobar, who was 17 on the time, was looking for to curry favor with MS-13 and alerted its members to the victims’ location in a wood space. Underneath MS-13 guidelines, the killings had been “pre-authorized” by gang management, prosecutors mentioned, and contributors to the carnage stood to realize membership or ascend the group’s ranks.

Authorities mentioned Escobar later tossed her cellphone from a shifting car — in addition to a SIM card that had been eliminated and broken so badly regulation enforcement couldn’t get well its contents.

“Moreover, Escobar discarded the bloody clothes that she had been sporting on the evening of the murders,” prosecutors wrote in a courtroom submitting.

MS-13, often known as La Mara Salvatrucha, recruits younger youngsters from El Salvador and Honduras, although many gang members had been born within the U.S. The gang has been blamed for dozens of killings since January 2016 throughout a large swath of Lengthy Island.

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