MS-13 terrorized Northern Virginia by killing at random, witnesses say.

The MS-13 members had been cruising all night in a gray Mercedes, searching for rival gang members to kill in Maryland or Virginia so they could bolster their street cred and expand their turf.

Then they spotted Antonio Kaoul Smith, 37, leaving a 7-Eleven convenience store in Dumfries, Va. He was a stranger carrying a plastic bag filled with food and drink, but the MS-13 members were desperate for a kill, according to federal prosecutors.

“I shot him in the back. That was the first shot, and with the second one, he fell to the ground,” Mario Guevara, 28, testified last week in the first of two back-to-back trials taking place in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va. “He started screaming at us not to do it,” Guevara, now a government witness, recalled. “He was saying in English, ‘Oh, my God,’ and in Spanish, ‘Amigo.’ He also said, ‘Stop, stop.’”

In the two trials, six alleged members of La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a violent street gang run from Central America and with a heavy presence in the United States, are charged with murder and racketeering in Northern Virginia. Prosecutors say the defendants were members of an MS-13 cell called “Sitios Locos Salvatrucha,” or STLS, that terrorized Prince William County by carrying out four murders from June to September 2019, ending with Smith’s.

Guevara pleaded guilty last year to three counts of murder, tampering with a witness by killing and a racketeering conspiracy. He received five life terms and agreed to testify against his former associates, hoping prosecutors will recommend a revised sentence of less than life in prison if he provides “substantial assistance” in the investigation. Another witness, Abner Molina, 26, struck a similar deal with prosecutors and took the stand last week after pleading guilty to two murders and a racketeering conspiracy. He is also serving multiple life sentences.

The gang members stocked up on firearms by selling cocaine at nightclubs, restaurants and clients’ homes in the area and kept a list of suspected rival gang members they had marked for death, according to a 20-count indictment backed by handwritten notes, witness testimony, and text and voice messages the gang exchanged.

Guevara said the gang hunted the first victim, Milton Beltran, 40, who was suspected of being a member of the rival Sureños gang, for approximately a month before spotting him at a gas station in Woodbridge, Va., on June 22, 2019. The MS-13 members lured Beltran to a wooded area, ostensibly to offer him drugs. When Beltran arrived with another man, Jairo Mayorga, 39, the MS-13 crew decided to kill both, Guevara testified.

“Armed with a 9-millimeter handgun, they shot Milton in the face,” Justice Department prosecutor Matthew K. Hoff said in his opening statement. “Jairo ran, but he didn’t get far, because they shot him as well.”

According to Guevara, who is slated to be one of the prosecution’s star witnesses at both trials, an MS-13 member named Carlos Turcio was the first to shoot Beltran. Mayorga “screamed when he heard the gunshot and began to run away,” but Turcio shot him and he collapsed, Guevara said.

Then Guevara recounted his own role in the nighttime slayings. Showing little emotion, Guevara testified that he shot Beltran three times, and when Mayorga got up and started running, Guevara shot him twice until he fell. Another gang member, Cristian Arevalo, then stabbed and shot Beltran, Guevara said. The crew then sped away in a car and started throwing gang signs to celebrate, Guevara recalled.

The six defendants chose to go to trial. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema granted a motion from defense attorneys to split them into two groups over prosecutors’ objections. In the first trial, which is expected to end this week or next, Melvin Canales is charged with ordering killings as second-in-command of the STLS crew operating in Northern Virginia. Also on trial are Manilester Andrade and Jairo Aguilera, who were both implicated in murders by the two cooperating witnesses.

Arevalo, Turcio and the alleged ringleader of the STLS cell, Marvin Menjivar, are facing murder and racketeering charges in the next trial, which is scheduled to start as soon as the jury begins deliberating in the first one. All the defendants face mandatory sentences of life in prison if convicted. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia declined to seek the death penalty.

Although MS-13′s code requires members to kill rival gang members, or “chavalas,” to be promoted within the organization, prosecutors, FBI agents, witnesses and Virginia police officials have narrated in painstaking detail over the course of several recent investigations how MS-13 members often get desperate for promotions and decide to target random people with no known gang ties, passing the victims off as rivals to dupe their superiors in El Salvador into granting them higher ranks.

In 2022, a jury convicted five MS-13 members in Northern Virginia of killing a 14-year-old who was falsely suspected of being a police informant, and of killing a 17-year-old who was wrongly thought to be a member of MS-13′s main rivals, the 18th Street gang. They all received mandatory terms of life imprisonment.

Molina testified that on Aug. 29, 2019, he was with Andrade, Arevalo and a fourth MS-13 member, Wilmer Cabrera, when they spotted Tate walking near an apartment complex on Bel Air Road in Woodbridge.

According to Molina, Arevalo “had an instinct” that Tate was a rival gang member. Arevalo shot Tate from behind, and then Andrade took more shots at Tate, Molina said. Tate “drew a gun and started firing toward the air as he was agonizing,” Molina testified.

Molina testified that although he was told to shoot Tate, his gun had only one round in the chamber, and he threw it into the woods. “I’d never seen that person before, and I knew he had nothing to do with … being a rival [gang] member,” Molina said.

An attorney for Andrade, Frank Salvato, called Molina’s story unbelievable and said Tate had been the first to open fire. Arevalo then shot back in self-defense, Salvato said in his opening statement. He urged the jury to give more weight to “the forensics, the ballistics, the common sense, pictures of the scene” than to the testimony of an admitted murderer trying to get a lighter prison sentence.

Referring to Andrade, Salvato said: “Manny admits to being involved in drugs. … He was with this group. … Manny says he didn’t shoot anyone. He was there, but he didn’t shoot anyone.”

A lawyer for Aguilera, Joseph King, pointed out some discrepancies between what Molina first told investigators when he was arrested and the story he was telling from the stand. Molina testified that the first time he tried to sell cocaine for the STLS crew, police in Fairfax County had caught him.

“The first time you sold drugs, you were unlucky enough to get caught?” King asked.

“Yes, sir,” Molina said.

Molina said that when he was later arrested, in November 2019, he lied to law enforcement and took sole blame for the double-homicide of Beltran and Mayorga. He was still “loyal” to the gang at that point and wanted to cover for other members, Molina testified.

But then he started feeling the pressure and decided to become a government witness, he said.

Aguilera told him he had to pay the gang back for “the firearms that were found at the house when I was arrested … because it was my fault,” Molina, who maintained weapons for the STLS cell, testified.

And Guevara, the other cooperating witness, told Molina “he was going to find out how to get ahold of my son, and if I didn’t pay up, my son was going to pay the consequences,” according to Molina’s testimony.

Molina went back to police, corrected his story, began implicating the others in the double-homicide and revealed that STLS members had also killed Smith and Tate, he said.