An MS-13 leader is on trial in Virginia for his involvement in six gruesome murders over the past five years. This includes an incident in which he and his gang shot a young waitress in the face so many times that her body became unrecognizable.
Federal prosecutors say 27-year-old Elmer Alas Candeley, a native of El Salvador, rose through the ranks of a brutal gang known for horrific violence and became one of Virginia's busiest killers. According to the Washington Post.
But now he is pursuing a lawsuit over the music in federal court in Alexandria, including murder and racketeering charges stemming from six murders in upscale Fairfax County, Virginia, and one in Massachusetts. The newspaper reported that he was charged with conspiracy and firearms charges.
Prosecutors say the murder case, which carries a life sentence for Aras Candeley if convicted, is the largest to go to trial in recent years.
Ironically, it may be his own people who torment him.
Of the eight other gang members charged with the killings last year, seven have pleaded guilty, and five have accused Alas Candy of being involved in all six killings from 2018 to 2022. He is scheduled to testify against Leh, the newspaper reported.
In court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Megan Brown listed details of the case as photos of the victim's brutally murdered body were shown on a television screen.
In one case, the crew of the Alas Candeley was investigating a group of people drinking, smoking, and selling drugs in a small wooded area behind a shopping center about 10 minutes east of Dulles International Airport. He was angry that he thought it was his territory.
This heinous act brought the police to the scene, and one night in 2019, they sent a message to kill 24-year-old Jose Guillen Mejia, who they first saw in the woods.
A detective testified that the gang members left his bullet-riddled body among a cluster of beer bottles and shell casings.
The following year, Alas Candeley and three others lured Iris Ponce Garcia, a 19-year-old waitress who had rant about MS-13 in a social media video, to the same woods and murdered her.
“They shot Iris 16 times, mostly in the face, so she was unrecognizable,” Brown told the court.
Two years later, they killed Rene Pineda Sanchez, 27, at the same location, according to the Washington Post. The reason was simply because he was hanging out in the woods.
The gang members beat the man so badly that the coroner said he appeared to have been the victim of a car accident, with his internal organs ruptured and his skull crushed by the rock.
And in 2022, they allegedly beat 42-year-old Francisco Avelar Rivera (aka “Papalito”) to death with a baseball bat at Seneca Regional Park in Great Falls, stabbed him several times and cut off his belongings. Brown added.
The man was known to be a heavy drinker who rose to prominence within the gang.
That was enough.
“They cut off his head. They cut off his hands. They cut off his arms. They cut off his legs,” Brown said.
“They buried Papalito's body in the forest, but it was not found for over a year.”
The details are being tracked given the gang's reputation for near-unparalleled brutality, with thousands of members often resorting to guns and machetes to conduct bloody transactions.
According to the Washington Post, Alas Candeley is accused of gangland crimes in 2021, similar to the 2018 murder of Kevin Abarca Choto, 18, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, over an unpaid debt. He is also accused of involvement in the assassination of his rival, Santos Antonio Trejo Lemus.
Nevertheless, Alas Candeley's defense attorney, Andrew Stewart, said prosecutors do not have the evidence needed to convict him of the crime.
“These gruesome photographs do not demonstrate that Mr. Alas Candeley committed these crimes,” Stewart said in his opening statement this week.
He also claimed that the five gang members who were overturned were simply trying to shift the blame “for their own benefit,” the newspaper added.
Meanwhile, prosecutors announced that they had found a list of murders that included Pineda Sánchez's name on Alas Candele's cell phone.
When they raided his home in Manassas, Virginia, they also recovered a handgun, two revolvers, two machetes, a baseball bat, a knife and ammunition related to the shooting, Brown said.
MS-13 has several thousand members in El Salvador, and the movement is led by leaders inside the country's prisons, the paper said.
Authorities in Northern Virginia have convicted dozens of suspected gangbangers on charges including murder, drug trafficking and human trafficking, but their presence in the Capitol area continues.
Alas, Candy Ray's trial will likely last several weeks.
