MS-13 member pleads guilty to slaying of 2 girls and 5 others in New York
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A high-ranking member of an MS-13 clique in New York pleaded guilty Tuesday to racketeering and other federal charges in a case involving seven slayings, including the 2016 killings of two high school girls that focused the nation’s attention on the violent Central American street gang.
Jairo Saenz, 28, entered the plea in federal court in Central Islip in a hearing attended by members of his family and some of the victims’ families. “I did these things and I knew they were wrong,” he said in Spanish through a translator after his lawyer read his accounting of the killings in suburban Long Island, just east of New York City.
Saenz, who is originally from El Salvador, will be sentenced June 13 and faces 40 to 60 years in prison as part of the plea deal approved by the judge. Prosecutors have said he was the second-in-commend in a gang clique operating in Brentwood and Central Islip known as Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside. His brother, Alexi Saenz, the clique’s leader, previously pleaded guilty to similar charges and will be sentenced later this month.
The brothers have admitted they ordered or approved the killings of rivals and others who disrespected or feuded with the clique in order to move up in the MS-13 hierarchy and bolster their group's reputation. Saenz’s family and lawyers didn’t comment outside court, but the parents of two of the victims said they wished he had been given a life sentence.
