The 23-year-old man, identified as Ian Cruz, might have been a target of MS-13, the transnational gang that President Donald Trump has used as a rallying cry against illegal immigration, the authorities said Sunday.
The police have arrested five people, including a 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, in connection with the Dec. 16 murder, according to a complaint filed in Criminal Court in Queens.
One of the suspects, Elmer Guttierez, 18, was arrested on weapon charges, while four others, Yonathan Sanchez, 22, Carlos Guerra, 18, and the two teenagers, whose names were not released, were accused of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
Cruz lived just a few blocks away from Bayswater Point State Park, near Jamaica Bay, where he was found.
He had been shot several times in the head with a .22-caliber gun, according to video surveillance footage and admissions made by some of the suspects, prosecutors said. The criminal complaint did not indicate a motive for the killing or say who was suspected of firing a weapon.
The suspects were arrested at an apartment building on Nameoke Street, in Far Rockaway, where prosecutors said all five may have lived. Investigators said they found a .22-caliber revolver and more than 900 rounds of ammunition in the apartment, a 10-minute drive from the state park.
The five suspects pleaded not guilty, said Gary F. Miret, the suspects’ lawyer during the arraignment Saturday. Guttierez was held on $500,000 bail, while the other four defendants were held without bail.
Miret declined to comment on the suspects’ immigration status, but disputed the allegation that all five suspects lived in the apartment.
“At this time he maintains his innocence in this matter as to being involved in any shooting or the taking of anybody’s life,” Miret said of Guttierez, whom he is representing at his next court appearance Jan. 15.
Federal and local authorities have said that MS-13 has a presence in Queens, but is not as active as it is on Long Island, where cliques formed in the late 1990s in Central American immigrant communities. What is now a transnational gang began in central Los Angeles in the 1980s, formed by Salvadoran refugees fleeing a civil war. With operations in El Salvador prisons, MS-13 is believed to have 10,000 members in 40 states, according to the FBI.
Trump has used the gang’s vicious resurgence in Long Island as fodder in his rhetoric against illegal immigration, portraying MS-13 as more of a national, pervasive threat than authorities say it is. In 2016 and 2017, there were 17 murders attributed to the gang in Suffolk County, including those of two teenage girls found on a Brentwood cul-de-sac and four young Latino men found behind a soccer field in Central Islip.
The gang members charged in many of these murders — in which authorities say victims were hacked with machetes, the signature weapon of MS-13 — are now part of a federal racketeering and organized crime case.
Less than two weeks ago, a Queens grand jury indicted 12 suspects on attempted murder and weapons and drug charges. Those defendants ranged in age from 20 to 35. Homeland Security Investigations coordinated the arrests with the police.
“These alleged members of MS-13 exhibited their propensity towards violence and murder when they plotted to murder a rival gang member in a place where the public congregates, with no regard to innocent lives,” Angel M. Melendez, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in New York, said in a statement.
In March 2018, the investigations unit said that it had arrested 36 suspected gang members in Queens over 10 months as part of Operation Matador, a gang crackdown that had led to the arrests of 475 people in the New York metropolitan area.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.