Ariana Funes-Diaz was a troubled 14-year old girl. She had been living in a group home for girls but ran away from it.
Ariana fell into a bad crowd – the violent MS-13 street gang.
She participated in a crime with four others.
Five teenagers – three boys and two girls – kidnapped and robbed a man in our nation’s capital.
Apparently, Ariana began to have second thoughts, possibly regrets, about what they had done.
Her partners in crime began to suspect that she was going to report them all (including herself) to police.
On April 18th, 2019, they took drastic action.
They drove her to an apartment complex in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a “sanctuary county”.
They took Ariana behind the complex into a wooded area.
First they humiliated her by forcing her to strip herself naked. Then they clubbed her with a baseball bat and hacked her with a machete. After she died, they dumped her body in a creek.
Ariana was missing more than a month, until her dead body was discovered on May 15th, 2019.
The four murderers were Josue Rafael Fuentes-Ponce, 16; Joel Ernesto Escobar, 17; Cynthia Hernandez-Nucamendi, 14; and Edwin Rios, 18.
Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar, both from El Salvador, were definitely two individuals who should not have been freely walking about this country.
Fuentes-Ponce had entered the U.S. in 2015 as part of a family unit, had been ordered removed in absentia in 2017, but of course was still here.
Escobar entered the U.S. as a part of a wave of unaccompanied minors in 2016, and was released to the custody of a family member in the Washington, D.C. area.
A year before Ariana’s murder, Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar had been arrested in Prince George’s County for attempted murder and other crimes. ICE lodged detainer warrants with the county but they were disregarded. The two gang members were eventually released without the county informing ICE, freeing them to kidnap, rob and murder Ariana.
Prince George’s County, remember, is a “sanctuary county”.
After all, declared Mary Lou McDonough, then the county’s Director of Corrections, “We will never hold anybody for ICE.”
The county’s refusal to hold Fuentes-Ponce and Escobar for ICE enabled these teenage criminals to continue their criminal activity and to kill Ariana Funes-Diaz.
Truly, public officials throughout our country who practice these so-called “sanctuary” policies have a lot to answer for.