This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (25 page)

S
abrosa woke up the next morning to catch a glimpse of Brenda, dressed and putting on her shoes. Pantera, Araña, Mousey, and one other Centrales member had just left the room. Sabrosa did not see the men leave and thought Brenda was making good on her escape to Philadelphia. She pretended to still be asleep and just watched Brenda put on her shoes and quietly leave the room.

As Brenda walked out, she mused that it would be the last time she would ever see that particular room, maybe even her last destroyer party. The time for her to leave was near—maybe even in a few days. But on this day, a beautiful Sunday morning, Brenda was determined to spend some quality time with some of her closest friends in the MS: her boyfriend at the time, Pantera, and her good friend Araña. She might be in trouble with the MS, but these guys wouldn’t do anything to harm her. Today will be a good day, she thought as she walked out of the elevator to meet up with the others. Araña loved to fish and had always told Brenda he would invite her to go with him. Her chance had finally arrived.

The friends left the hotel and drove east to the Shenandoah River valley. They planned to drop off Mousey before heading to the river to fish and hang out. The drive to the mountains was uneventful. The ride along Interstate 66 was a straight shot to the small town where
they dropped off Mousey. From there, the fishing expedition turned south on Interstate 81 and headed toward Meem’s Bottom Bridge, a single-lane bridge that had sat in a quiet corner of eastern Virginia for over a hundred years.

With a 204-foot span of solid Burr arch truss construction, the old wooden bridge stretched across the north fork of the lazy, slow-moving Shenandoah. The spot was a favorite of fishermen seeking quiet and solitude away from major highways and commercial centers. The lush vegetation along the banks of the river was broken in places by small granite boulders that spread apart the forest just enough to provide room to cast a baited hook into the lazy ripples.

Pantera pulled the Mazda off the road just in front of the bridge. They all got out of the car and walked across the bridge, laughing and joking about the night before. They headed down to the river along a narrow muddy path. Spring and early summer rains had swollen the river beyond its banks, saturating and softening the ground as it receded. The old fisherman’s path lay inside the small flood plane, twisting and turning through the forest, bending with the contours of the riverbank. Pantera was first, with Brenda following behind. Araña was behind her, and the fourth MS member followed some distance behind him.

Picking their way through the forest, the small group slowly made progress toward one of Araña’s favorite fishing spots, next to some tall granite boulders that sat on the riverbank. They had to walk away from the river to get to higher ground and double back to a point where they could get on top of the rock formation and then climb down to the river. Pantera jumped off the small ledge first, landing on the riverbank. He then turned around to help Brenda. She was five months pregnant and couldn’t jump down alone. She landed off balance and slipped and fell in the mud. Her hands and knees made indentions in the soft silt.

Araña jumped down as Pantera helped Brenda up. Pantera then positioned himself behind her. Araña stood in front of Brenda, facing the river, before he turned around and slowly removed the knife he had hidden under his shirt. He quickly approached her. Standing behind Brenda, Pantera slowly removed a rope and a knife from the backpack he wore.

Before Brenda saw the knife in Araña’s hands, he reached forward
and stabbed her in the inner thigh. Shocked by his sudden action, Brenda looked up at him.

“What happened,
homito
?” Brenda asked with love and concern in her voice.

But Araña didn’t answer.

Pantera then reached over her head with the rope and pulled it tight across her neck. Brenda screamed and began struggling with the rope. Then she was silent.

She needed air.

Pantera held the rope tight with one hand and with a knife in the other, he reached over Brenda’s shoulder and began stabbing her in the chest. Araña attacked a second time. He began repeatedly stabbing her stomach, sinking the knife in before pulling it out to stab her again.

The men worked with determination. No one spoke or yelled. Brenda had no air to fill her lungs for a second scream. The men breathed heavily. Both were resigned to their task. But Brenda didn’t fight. Even if she had managed to defend herself or her attackers had had a sudden change of heart, it was already too late. The first stab in her inner thigh was enough to kill her. It had hit a main artery.

In the seconds between Araña’s first cut and when Pantera attacked her from behind, a flood of realities hit Brenda with the full force of unavoidable certainty. Denis had betrayed her. She would never again see the father of her child. Her baby was dead. She would die alone.

They had all completely fooled her. She knew of so many schemes to babysit an MS target, but blinded by her love for Denis and the trust she felt for the two men wielding the knives, Brenda failed to see they were babysitting her.

“Why are you doing this?” Brenda struggled to get out.

Before Pantera cut deeply across Brenda’s throat from behind, nearly decapitating her, Araña answered her question.

“This is for the Mara Salvatrucha.”

Then Pantera let her go. Brenda’s body fell lifelessly to the ground. The two left Brenda’s body just feet from the riverbank behind the largest rock in the group of boulders by the river. The job was done. The traitor was dead.

The other MS member had no idea what had happened. Some distance away, he was throwing rocks into the river when he had heard Brenda scream. He looked downriver to see Araña and Pantera stabbing
her. Frenzied and confused, he broke into a run and headed back to the car to await his fate. He didn’t know if he’d be next. When the other two arrived, they chastised him for running away. What kind of gang member did that? On the way back to Virginia, the boy rode in the backseat, sick to his stomach. The other two chatted idly, but mostly rode in silence. Brenda’s death, it seemed, weighed heavily on all of them.

B
renda’s body was not discovered for three days. Like Javier Calzada, fishermen who called the local cops found her remains. Lieutenant John Thomas, with the Shenandoah County sheriff’s office, was one of the first local police to respond. Right away, he could tell it was a murder, but there was no identification on the body. He had a Jane Doe on his hands and needed to act fast to solve the mystery.

Eyeing the horrific scene, Thomas was sickened. He knew it had been a while since the murder had happened, and with a heavy sigh realized the visible tattoos were his best bet for identifying the victim. After making it through the long day of initiating the investigation, Thomas left the tragic scene and set about faxing the photos of the tattoos to a number of police departments around Virginia. He wondered if anyone would recognize them. Detective Mike Porter was the first to call—he’d lost track of a federal witness with similar tattoos.

After he got off the phone with Thomas, Porter immediately called Alexander.

“It looks like Brenda was killed in Shenandoah County,” Porter said, with a mixture of remorse and frustration in his voice. He tried to be professional, as did Alexander, but both were considerably disturbed by Brenda’s murder. They had worked hard to keep her safe and alive and were ultimately perplexed by her own decisions. What
was going on in her head? Why did she go back to Virginia when she was perfectly safe in Minnesota? It was a mystery to them, but the murder itself was not. They knew there were a limited number of people who could have killed Brenda, and it was likely that those men were in their region. They were determined to find out what happened and catch her killers.

Later that night, Greg’s phone rang. Before he began working Brenda’s case, he had missed most calls that came in while he was sleeping. But during the long months of his relationship with Brenda, he had grown accustomed to her random calls at any hour. When his phone rang, he thought it might be her. It was Porter.

There is only one reason why Porter is calling at this hour, Greg thought. Brenda was dead.

Many thoughts simultaneously wove together through Greg’s head. He was very disappointed, but not surprised. For weeks, Greg had steeled himself to Brenda’s probable death. He’d always known it was a possible outcome to her story. His hope drained away and turned to dust. Up to that moment, Greg had held out a small amount of hope that somehow Brenda would pull out of her free fall. She would call someone or do something. He didn’t know what, but somehow she would make it. He wondered about Denis. Wasn’t he trying to protect her, or did he order her death?

Greg was grateful it was Porter who told him first. He knew the detective would give him the information in a genuine way and give him the space to work through it on his own. That night Greg didn’t fall back asleep. His thoughts were focused on all the questions surrounding Brenda’s murder—who, how, when, why?

The next day, Porter and Alexander drove out to meet with Thomas to make a positive match. After viewing the body they were all but positive it was Brenda Paz. The DNA and fingerprint reports confirmed it. A day later, it was official: the Jane Doe was Brenda Paz.

Alexander and the other detectives suspected that local MS members had killed Brenda. They scouted the area in Shenandoah County, but found little evidence to support that theory. The killers were long gone.

Before Brenda’s body was identified, state troopers found Sabrosa, Pantera, Diablito, and others sitting in Sabrosa’s car, parked in the emergency lane on the New Jersey Turnpike. They were driving to New York when Sabrosa’s car broke down. With no other way to get around
it, they accepted the help offered by the officers and made their way back to Virginia.

Sabrosa meant to get back to her car, but she never did. The New Jersey police impounded it, still muddy from the day Pantera and Araña took Brenda fishing. But the numerous members of law enforcement working on Brenda’s case had not yet made that connection.

On the first day of August, a little under a year since Brenda had first met with Alexander and decided to become a federal witness, Porter hosted an interagency meeting to talk about the Brenda Paz murder case. All involved needed to get coordinated and figure out who did it.

A federal witness had been murdered, and a number of cops wanted in on the case. The National Park police claimed a lead role on the investigation because Brenda agreed to be a witness for the Joaquin Diaz murder on Daingerfield Island. Alexander offered to help coordinate all the information coming in from the various phone calls and interviews that police in Fairfax and Arlington conducted with Denis Rivera, who as the suspect in the Joaquin Diaz murder was seen as their primary suspect in Brenda Paz’s murder. By now, all the cops involved were well apprised of the Mara Salvatrucha’s willingness to intimidate and, if necessary, kill witnesses. It was Brenda who had told them.

Rick Rodriguez, Victor Ignacio, and Mike Porter offered support, and after the meeting went to their offices to immediately begin combing through their files and the interviews with Denis to track down the hit men. They knew Denis was in prison when Brenda was killed. Maybe he’d given the order, but someone else had carried it out.

Lieutenant Thomas in Shenandoah continued to receive calls from Porter and Rodriguez, who updated him on their work on the case. They were scouting bars, corners, and other popular MS hangouts in their areas, trying to find someone they could question about Brenda’s murder.

Another interagency meeting was held five days later to go over all the information everyone had collected so far. They reviewed interview notes with Denis and other gang members. They went over transcripts of recorded conversations. The group generated a number of leads, but nothing was yet concrete.

Brenda’s murder investigation proved difficult. There were so many individuals involved in the investigation that initially coordination was very challenging. Issues of jurisdiction arose. Lines of friction had to be ironed out before smooth progress could be made. Whether Denis
and Pantera planned for this to happen or not, the networked nature of the Mara Salvatrucha took its toll on law enforcement.

A month after the second meeting among all the men working on Brenda’s murder case, Rodriguez obtained critical information during an interview of a suspect in Arlington. There was a white Mazda SUV in New Jersey that Brenda might have ridden in during the weeks before she was killed. He called Alexander to tell him the news, and the FBI agent offered to follow up on the information. The car was searched four days later, and a significant amount of evidence was recovered.

In an unrelated event, Mousey, the MS member Pantera and Araña took home the day they killed Brenda, was interviewed in early October about criminal street gangs in northern Virginia. He was a random pickup and not initially considered part of the Brenda Paz murder investigation. During that interview Mousey revealed his connection to the Centrales clique and was placed on the growing list of suspects.

With information from Mousey’s interview and the evidence found in Sabrosa’s SUV, Porter, Rodriguez, and Alexander tightened the noose around a number of Centrales members in northern Virginia. It was only a matter of time before they arrested Pantera, Diablito, and Araña, all suspected of Brenda Paz’s murder. But no indictment had yet been handed down.

Before his arrest, Pantera cornered Sabrosa.

“You’d better not say anything or else your kids will grow up without a mother or you’ll get old without them,” he told her. She knew it was not a hollow threat.

Enough evidence was found in Sabrosa’s car and gleaned from a number of interviews to implicate Araña as a primary suspect. When his arrest warrant was served in Arlington, he went quietly, remorseful.

It wasn’t long before he agreed to talk. By the end of the year, Rodriguez, Ignacio, and others had interviewed dozens of leads and put many people before a grand jury, trying to pull together all the angles in Brenda Paz’s murder. They were close to an indictment, but obtaining one for a capital murder case took time, witnesses, cooperation from informed individuals, and undeniable evidence. Araña’s confession would give them the additional information they needed.

Ignacio, Rodriguez, and another FBI agent had the opportunity to interview Araña in Alexandria. Nearly a year had passed since Brenda was killed, and they were finally close to bringing the investigation to
court. Araña’s own demons had worked on him for eleven months. He was prepared to talk.

Araña was mostly worried about his kids and Maria Gomez, the mother of his daughter. He knew the rules. If he told the cops about what happened, the MS might not be able to get to him, but they could get to Maria and the kids. Before talking about what happened that day on the north fork of the Shenandoah River, he asked for protection for his family.

Rodriguez couldn’t offer him anything. Ignacio told Araña he should just do the right thing. Brenda had died a horrible death, and he was in a position to give her justice. Apparently that was enough. During two interviews, Araña told the police everything that had happened. He began by working around the edges, slowly moving toward the center of the investigators’ concern.

Araña told them about his clique, the Centrales. He identified Diablito, Cabro, and Veto, but initially, Araña would not implicate himself, Pantera, or the other MS member present that day by the river. When he spoke of Denis, he told the police Denis loved Brenda.

“The guy loves her, you understand,” Araña said.

“Brenda never suspected what was going to happen,” Araña said, saddened by his own words. When he finally began telling the truth, Araña placed himself at the crime.

“We walked calmly through the woods to the river’s edge and helped Brenda jump down from the rock.” Araña described how Brenda was too pregnant to jump down by herself. After some pressure from Rodriguez, Araña admitted he was the first to stab her. He never implicated Pantera or the other MS member present and refused to testify on the stand.

After concluding the interviews with Araña, enough evidence was in place to issue an indictment and begin the capital murder case against Denis Rivera, Pantera, Araña, and the fourth MS member present that day.