A member of the violent MS-13 gang was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for taking part in a brutal attack involving a machete outside of Dallas, Texas, two years ago.
Manuel Amaya-Alvarez, a 22-year-old El Salvadorian national who was in the U.S. illegally, was sentenced to 20 years on November 14, according to a press release from the Department of Justice (DOJ). Amaya-Alvarez was one of several MS-13 gang members involved in the attack, which resulted in serious physical injuries to two men and the death of a female.
Amaya-Alvarez admitted in September 2017 that he and his fellow gang members planned to “take out” four individuals at the Running Bear Park just outside of Dallas, in Irving, Texas. Members of the gang lured a man they believed was part of a rival gang to the park, claiming they wanted to purchase his tattoo machine. When the man arrived at the park with two other men and a woman, Amaya-Alvarez and another gang member greeted the group.
The group of four was taken into a wooded area, where other gang members armed with a shotgun as well as machetes and clubs revealed themselves. The four victims were surrounded and forced to their knees. The MS-13 gang members robbed the four individuals and then began attacking them.
The three men were able to escape, but two of them suffered blunt force trauma and cuts from the gang’s weapons. The woman, according to the DOJ, “was savagely maimed and left for dead.”
The DOJ provided no update to the cases of the other gang members involved in the attack.
This wasn’t even the only machete attack carried out by the MS-13 gang. In September of this year, six MS-13 gang members were arrested for murdering Daniel Cueller on July 31 in Maryland. The Daily Wire previously reported that Cueller had allegedly flashed the hand sign of a rival street gang, leading to the attack by MS-13.
Cueller,21, was then stalked and stabbed to death outside his apartment building. One of the murders allegedly used a knife similar to a machete in the attack.
A total of seven people were arrested for the murder after surveillance video showed them stalking Cueller. Six of the individuals arrested were members of MS-13 and in the country illegally – five from El Salvador and one from Mexico.
As The Daily Wire reported at the time, Maryland has been struggling with MS-13 violence for years, including the beating death of 14-year-old Ariana Funes-Diaz in July. In August, a member of MS-13 was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and stabbing a rival gang member to death four years earlier, and in April 2018, another MS-13 member was sentenced to 35 years in prison for stabbing a member of a rival gang three years earlier.