A $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man police say gunned down a pair of 22 year olds remains unclaimed more than a year after their bodies were discovered burning on a Bronx roadside.
Cops have had their eyes peeled for 35-year-old Steven Santiago since May last year, after police found the bodies of Jesse Parrilla and Nikki Huang in the burning wreckage of a sedan parked on Shore Road near the Split Rock Golf Course in Pelham Bay.
Their deaths were ruled a murder after an autopsy revealed both victims suffered gunshot wounds to the head and body, cops said.
Police believed Santiago and Lower East Side gang banger Jahmel Sanders, 31, kidnapped Huang and Parrilla at shortly after 1 a.m. on May 16, 2022, before executing them and dumping their bodies in the burning car.
Sanders was arrested and arraigned before a Bronx Criminal Court judge in March this year on charges including murder, kidnapping, and arson.
Prosecutors are looking to keep Sanders locked up for life, calling the double homicide a cold-blooded revenge killing.
“It was retaliation for a previous murder,” Bronx Assistant DA Burim Namani said during the arraignment. “It’s a gang-related matter.”
Sanders pled not guilty to the laundry list of charges brought against him, and is currently being held at Rikers Island without bail.
“(We’re) devastated, empty, heartbroken,” said a relative of the 22-year-old Parrilla, one of about a dozen sobbing family members of the victims who attended the hearing in March.
The Daily News reported on the fierce rivalry between the Up The Hill and Down the Hill gangs that led to the brutal double homicide in June last year, when Huang, robbed of her purse, sought out help from friends in one of the gangs — setting in motion eight hours of terrifying tit-for-tat violence.
The mayhem would leave three dead, including Huang, a 22-year-old nail salon owner, and her friend Parrilla, and three others shot and wounded across three boroughs.
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