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Alex Horton
Generalist journalist responsible for national news and latest news
Exactly two years ago, people gathered at Long Island's Brentwood High School to remember the teenagers Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens, allegedly killed by suspected members of an MS-13 gang. The night was pierced with hundreds of flames of candles gathered on the football field, although both friends dream of playing professional basketball.
Kayla's mother, Evelyn Rodriguez, organized another vigil on Friday to mark just two years since Kayla's body was found in a wooded area off Ray Court, a verdant cul-de-sac.
The family set up a memorial along the street for Kayla, whose President Trump, killing, invoked his speech on the state of the Union in January.
Friday afternoon, someone came out of a house on the street to dismantle the memorial, reported CBS New York. A witness told the station that a woman had opened balloons on the screen. Rodriguez and Kayla's father, Manny Cuevas, became furious and shouted at a woman driving a white Nissan Rogue, captured in a tense video by News 12 Long Island.
Then the woman tried to flee. Rodriguez was hit by the vehicle and was later declared dead in a hospital, the Suffolk County Police Department said. Homicide investigators are investigating, the department said in a statement, but a spokesman declined on Saturday to say whether the driver would face charges. The woman was a relative of a resident in the street, police said.
Rodriguez, 50, expressed grief and sorrow over her daughter's murder to become perhaps the most visible defender of MS-13 victims.
"Many members of these gangs took advantage of flagrant gaps in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied foreign minors and ended up in Kayla and Nisa High School," said the president. They stood up for a standing ovation.
Dozens of murders perpetrated on Long Island since 2013 shook communities and transformed the debate on immigration policy. Trump used brutal murders such as Kayla's to raise the specter of the transnational gang as an existential threat, and he advocated for stricter immigration legislation.
The data show that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens.
Trump Friday night noted Rodriguez's death. "My thoughts and prayers are with Evelyn Rodriguez tonight, with her family and friends," he wrote on Twitter.
[‘Vying for control’: How MS-13 uses violence and extortion in America’s jails]
Rodriguez sued Kayla High School for $ 110 million, claiming that her daughter had been intimidated and accosted by an alleged gang member who, according to Rodriguez, was still in school, even after complaining to administrators.
"She said to me, 'Ma, they go back to school. It's like they're everywhere, "Rodriguez said.
Evelyn Rodriguez stands near a memorial for her daughter, Kayla Cuevas, on February 16, 2018 in Brentwood, New York (Michael Noble Jr. for the Washington Post)
After a confrontation in Brentwood, federal prosecutors say MS-13 gave Kayla the go-ahead and members made a "throaty" gesture at his school, according to the lawsuit.
A week later, she returned home one evening with a basketball teammate, one day before her sixteenth birthday, when members of MS-13 saw them and were attacked with machetes and baseball bats.
[[[[MS-13 "picks up school," warned a teenager before being killed.]
Federal prosecutors believe that thousands of Central American immigrants are members of MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, in the United States. He started as a street gang in Los Angeles in the 1980s.
Four prosecutors have been indicted in the Kayla and Nisa killings, prosecutors said in March 2017. They were apprehended as part of a wider looting of 13 members accused in seven murder cases, among other charges. charge. Convictions could lead to the death penalty.
Rodriguez, who participated in a round table on immigration policy in May with Trump, told legislators last year that parents feared their children would play outside with other children.
"The MS-13 gang is so unpredictable that you do not know who's who with them," Rodriguez said. "MS-13 is a new generation of murderers, children, children who kill children and, as they continue to grow, their helpless child recruitment techniques in their evil actions. also."
Michael E. Miller contributed to this report.
Read more:
Perspectives: Five myths about MS-13
"Time bomb": MS-13 threatens college, warns teachers, parents and students
"People live here in fear": MS-13 threatens a community seven miles from the White House
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