The bodies of four males, all described as having suffered “significant trauma,” were discovered in a park in a Long Island neighborhood that has for years contended with a growing problem of gang violence.
The victims, whose ages and identities were not immediately released, were found in the Central Islip Recreation Village Park near Lowell Avenue and Clayton Street in Central Islip, authorities said.
Justin Meyers, assistant to the Suffolk County police commissioner, said Thursday that the killings all appeared to be “recent homicides.” Meyers declined to comment on whether the killings of the four people were gang-related, but the matter is under investigation.
Parents and relatives of missing 16-year-old Justin Llivicura arrived at the park Thursday to talk with police officers and ask for more information on the bodies found there. The teen had gone to the park with friends on Tuesday but has not been answering his phone since then, relatives said. The family filed a missing person report with police on Wednesday.
“I’m looking for my son,” said father Marcelo Llivicura. “I don’t know if this is my son or no.”
The discovery of the bodies comes about a month after the arrest of eight MS-13 gang members in connection with the September killings of two teenage girls in nearby Brentwood.
Gang violence has been a problem in Central Islip, Brentwood and other Long Island communities for more than a decade, but Suffolk County police and the FBI began pouring resources into a crackdown after the killings of the girls, along with two other Brentwood High School students involved in separate killings, sparked outrage. Brentwood and Central Islip are neighboring communities comprised of large populations of working class Hispanic and other minorities, located about 2.5 miles apart.
Prosecutors said Kayla Cuevas, 16, was targeted last summer by a group of four gang members, including two juveniles, because she had been feuding with MS-13 members at school and on social media. The posse, which had been roving in a car looking for gang enemies, attacked when they came across her walking with Nisa Mickens, 15, in the street. The inseparable best friends were attacked with a machete and baseball bats, officials said.
Nisa “was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging out with her childhood friend,” former U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said in announcing the arrests. The site where the bodies were found is just blocks away from the federal courthouse where the alleged killers are being prosecuted.
The MS-13 gang, also called Mara Salvatrucha, is believed to have been founded as a neighborhood street gang in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s by immigrants fleeing a civil war in El Salvador. It grew after some members were deported to El Salvador, helping to turn that country into one of the most violent places in the world. It’s now a major international criminal enterprise with tens of thousands of members in several Central American countries and many U.S. states.
Last December, President Donald Trump referenced the slayings in Brentwood during a profile for his Time magazine Person of the Year award.
One of the Republican president’s priorities is a crackdown on immigrants who are in the country illegally and have committed crimes. He promised as much in a Time interview, referencing a Newsday story about the killings.
“They come from Central America. They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met,” he said. “They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal. And they are finished.”
Source: 4 Males Found Dead in Park on Long Island | NBC New York http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/4-Males-Found-Dead-in-Park-on-Long-Island-Police-419349024.html#ixzz4e9PAHQb4
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Nothing new. I grew up in Nassau County on Long Island, 5 miles from the border with Queens and ten miles from Brooklyn. When I was growing up there were Mafia members living in the town I grew up in (the town I grew up in was roughly 25 percent Italian, 25 percent Jewish, 25 percent Irish/German/East European, and 25 percent other, including Hispanic (the first black family to move in was in the mid-60s). Hempstead, 3 miles to the east, was about half-black. And the further east you went, the black and Hispanic population grew proportionally. By the time I left Long Island (early 80s), Suffolk County was close to 50 percent black and Hispanic, and Nassau County to the west was catching up. As far as gangs were concerned, they mostly had Mafia connections (and were mostly Italian). A college I went to, SUNY Old Westbury, was mostly minority (open admissions, and maybe the cornerstone of burgeoning political correctness). Before I left Long Island in 1981 I visited a friend in Central Islip, and he told me that black and Hispanic gangs (not violent, but still) were all the rage. In 1971 I took a quick job as a factory worker in Copaige, (not far from Brentwood)…Copaige was mostly black then as well.
But how working class blacks and Hispanics put up with thugs like MS-13 is beyond me! But guess what folks? People in my neck of the woods can be just as mystifying–in the local city of Alpine, Texas, in the last two years, it has been reported of several kidnapped local girls or Sul Ross students, and local cops think it was either MS-13 or drug gangs from Mexico.
But does anything think ol’ Trump will do anything about it? Because I don’t!