CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP) — A man who helped lead an MS-13 clique in New York pleaded guilty Tuesday in a federal racketeering case involving seven murders, 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, faces 40 to 60 years in prison as part of the plea deal approved by the judge.
Prosecutors said he was the second-in-command in a gang clique known as Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside that quietly terrorized the hamlets of Brentwood and Central Islip for months before a particularly brutal crime on Sept. 13, 2016, made headlines.
Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, lifelong friends and classmates at Brentwood High School, were walking through a quiet neighborhood near their homes when they were killed with a machete and a baseball bat by a group of young men and teenage boys who had stalked them in a car.
More killings followed in the coming months. President Donald Trump blamed the violence and gang growth on lax immigration policies as he made several visits to Long Island, invited Cuevas' mother to his State of the Union address in 2018, and later called for the death penalty for Saenz and others arrested in the killings.
Saenz's 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.
“It was some justice, but not what I wanted,” said George Johnson, the father of 29-year-old Michael Johnson, who was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in Brentwood in 2016. “At least he’s not out in the street to hurt anybody else.”
Nisa's mother, Elizabeth Alvarado, lamented that her daughter was just a day shy of her 16th birthday when she died.
“That really hurt because she had so many dreams,” Alvarado said outside the courthouse. “She wanted to be a veterinarian. She wanted to be a nurse like me and her dad. There’s just so many things that I’m missing out on.”
Other victims in the case included Javier Castillo, a 15-year-old whom prosecutors say gang members befriended before driving him to a secluded park and attacking him with machetes.
Another victim, Oscar Acosta, 19, was discovered dead in a wooded area near some railroad tracks five months after leaving home to play soccer.
Older victims included Esteban Alvarado-Bonilla, 29, who was killed by a gunman inside a Central Islip deli in early 2017 and Dewann Stacks, 34, who was ambushed and beaten to death as he walked along a road in Brentwood.
Saenz also pleaded guilty Tuesday to his participation in three attempted killings; arson; narcotics trafficking; firearms offenses; and a conspiracy to kill Marcus Bohannon, who was slain by other MS-13 members in 2016.
Acting U.S. Attorney Carolyn Pokorny said in a statement that Saenz took part in “barbaric, and multiple acts of senseless gang violence that had turned parts of Long Island into a war zone” with MS-13 gang members “wielding guns, machetes, bats and fire” in their reign of terror.
“It is my sincere hope that today’s guilty plea brings some measure of solace and closure to the families of the defendant’s victims who continue to mourn the deaths of their loved ones,” she added.
FILE - A memorial to best friends Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas in Brentwood, N.Y., Sept. 27, 2016, near the spot where their bodies were found. (AP Photo/Claudia Torrens, File)
Elizabeth Alvarado, the mother of Nisa Mickens, a 15-year-old who was killed by MS-13 gang members in 2016, speaks outside the federal court, behind, in Central Islip, New York, where Jairo Saenz, a high-ranking member of a local MS-13 clique, pleaded guilty to racketeering and other federal charges on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Philip Marcelo)
George Johnson, the father of Michael Johnson, a 29-year-old who was killed by MS-13 gang members in 2016, speaks outside the federal court, behind, in Central Islip, New York, where Jairo Saenz, a high-ranking member of a local MS-13 clique, pleaded guilty to racketeering and other federal charges on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Philip Marcelo)
This undated mug shot released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York, shows who authorities identify as Jairo Saenz in New York. (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York via AP)
A hotline between military and civilian air traffic controllers in Washington, D.C., that hasn't worked for more than three years may have contributed to another near miss shortly after the U.S. Army resumed flying helicopters in the area for the first time since January's deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and a Black Hawk helicopter, Sen. Ted Cruz said at a hearing Wednesday.
The Federal Aviation Administration official in charge of air traffic controllers, Frank McIntosh, confirmed the agency didn't even know the hotline hadn't been working since March 2022 until after the latest near miss. He said civilian controllers still have other means of communicating with their military counterparts through landlines. Still, the FAA insists the hotline be fixed before helicopter flights resume around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
The Army said in a statement Wednesday that is it “working with the FAA to resolve the direct communications line between the Pentagon pad tower and the DCA tower and determine what repairs are required to restore services.” DCA is the code for Reagan airport.
It said the Army “continues to restrict flights to the Pentagon pad to only mission essential operations until the line is repaired or improved communication procedures are implemented and accepted by the FAA.”
The FAA said in a statement that the dedicated direct access line between air traffic controllers at Reagan and the Pentagon's Army heliport hasn't worked since 2022 because of the construction of a new tower at the Pentagon. But the FAA said “the two facilities continue to communicate via telephone for coordination.”
“The developments at DCA in its airspace are extremely concerning,” Cruz said. “This committee remains laser-focused on monitoring a safe return to operations at DCA and making sure all users in the airspace are operating responsibly.”
The Army suspended all helicopter flights around Reagan airport after the latest near miss, but McIntosh said the FAA was close to ordering the Army to stop flying because of the safety concerns before it did so voluntarily.
“We did have discussions if that was an option that we wanted to pursue,” McIntosh told the Senate Commerce Committee at the hearing.
Jeff Guzzetti, a former NTSB and FAA accident investigator, said “the fact that they were unaware that this connection was not working for three years is troublesome.” But he is not entirely clear on the purpose of the hotline when controllers had other ways to communicate.
But Guzzetti thinks the Army needs to be more forthcoming about what it is doing to ensure the airspace around Washington remains safe. Since the crash, the Army has at times refused to provide information that Congress has asked for, and officials didn't answer all the questions at a previous hearing.
“The DCA airspace is under the white hot spotlight. So the Army’s going to have to be more transparent and more assertive in their dealings with this problem,” Guzzetti said.
According to a U.S. official, one course of action under consideration now is to have the Army give 24 hours notice of any flights around National Airport. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because no decisions have been made and discussions are ongoing.
January's crash between an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter killed 67 people — making it the deadliest plane crash on U.S. soil since 2001. The National Transportation Safety Board has said there were an alarming 85 near misses around Reagan in the three years before the crash that should have prompted action.
Since the crash, the FAA has tried to ensure that military helicopters never share the same airspace as planes, but controllers had to order two planes to abort their landings on May 1 because of an Army helicopter circling near the Pentagon.
“After the deadly crash near Reagan National Airport, FAA closed the helicopter route involved, but a lack of coordination between FAA and the Department of Defense has continued to put the flying public at risk,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth said.
McIntosh said the helicopter should never have entered the airspace around Reagan airport without permission from an air traffic controller.
“That did not occur,” he said. “My question — and I think the larger question is — is why did that not occur? Without compliance to our procedures and our policies, this is where safety drift starts to happen.”
The NTSB is investigating what happened.
In addition to that incident, a commercial flight taking off from Reagan airport had to take evasive action after coming within a few hundred feet of four military jets heading to a flyover at Arlington National Cemetery. McIntosh blamed that incident on a miscommunication between FAA air traffic controllers at a regional facility and the tower at Reagan, which he said had been addressed.
Associated Press writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.
FILE - Rescue and salvage crews pull up a part of a Army Black Hawk helicopter that collided midair with an American Airlines jet, at a wreckage site in the Potomac River from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Feb. 6, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
FILE - Salvage crews work on recovering wreckage near the site in the Potomac River of a mid-air collision between an American Airlines jet and a Black Hawk helicopter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
