Crime scene investigators collect evidence in Alley Pond Park in 2017.
File photo by Mark Hallum
Grisly new details have emerged in the brutal murder of a 16-year-old gang member at Alley Pond Park in Bayside a half-decade ago. The revelations were presented Monday in Brooklyn federal court as the murder trial of reputed MS-13 gang leader Melvi Amador-Rios, 32, got underway.
Amador-Rios allegedly ordered the killing of Julio Vasquez after the teenager failed to kill his friend, thus falling out of favor with MS-13, according to federal prosecutors.
“On that May evening, the defendant and two other MS-13 members lured him to the park where the two lower-ranking members stabbed him over and over and over until he was dead,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Rafaella Belizaire said during his opening statement. “They nearly decapitated him. And they did it because their leader of the gang, the defendant, Melvi Amador-Rios ordered them to.”
Vazquez was left to die in a remote and heavily wooded part of the park known for its natural and ungroomed wetlands.
“The very next day, Julio Vasquez’s mother, concerned about her son, went to the police, and tried to report Julio Vasquez missing,” Belizaire said. “Vazquez’s body was found later on May 21 of 2017 by an unsuspecting bird watcher who smelled and saw a decomposing body.”
Amador-Rios, a Briarwood resident known as “Letal” and “Pinky,” is also accused of ordering a “series of murder missions,” including a hit on a rival gang member in Jamaica on Oct. 23, 2016.
“Louis Serrano, who was a 16-year-old boy that the defendant’s clique believed was a member of the rival 18th Street gang, and his association with 18th Street was enough for the defendant’s clique to target him for death,” Belizaire said. “Like good foot soldiers, and with the expectation of rising in the ranks, they tracked down Luis Serrano, attacked him and ultimately shot him in the head.”
Serrano survived the…
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