A high-ranking MS-13 member on Long Island will spend 68 years behind bars for his role in eight murders, including ordering the brutal 2016 slayings of two teenage girls as revenge for a high school brawl.
Alexi Saenz, 30, was “the driving force behind a devastating crime wave that terrorized that community for over a year in 2016 and 2017,” prosecutors said in a May court filing.
On Wednesday, Long Island Federal Court Judge Gary Brown handed down Saenz’s sentence, as the grief-stricken relatives of the gang member’s victims looked on.
Last year, Saenz pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in Long Island Federal Court, admitting he authorized the horrifying killings of Kayla Cuevas, 16, and Nisa Mickens, 15, in Brentwood, L.I.
Nisa’s mom, Elizabeth Alvarado, brought her daughter’s ashes to court with her in a wooden box as she addressed the court, Newsday reported.
“I’ve been waiting eight years for this moment,” she said, according to the newspaper. “I almost took my life to be with her.”
Saenz and his brother, Julio, gave the green light to the Sept. 13, 2016, murders after Kayla and her friends fought with MS-13 members at Brentwood High School a week earlier, federal prosecutors said.
Members of the gang’s Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside clique were hunting for their rivals when they spotted Kayla walking in Brentwood, according to the feds. Nisa, Kayla’s childhood friend, was walking alongside her, and the gang members decided to kill her, too.
So they called the Saenz brothers, who gave them the go-ahead, then poured out of their car, wielding baseball bats and a machete, and swarmed the teens. Nisa’s mutilated body was found on the street shortly after, while Kayla’s was found behind a nearby house the next day.
“The frequency and brutality of the violence unleashed by the defendant’s clique was unprecedented, even for the MS-13 — a gang that values violence and murder above all else,” prosecutors wrote. “Simply put, during the defendant’s tenure as leader, the Sailors clique was the most violent and destructive MS-13 clique operating in the United States.”
Prosecutors were asking for a 70-year sentence, pointing out that even after his guilty plea, Saenz took part in a botched plot in December to use a rope to smuggle a package with 18 cell phones, around 345 grams of pot and a liter of booze through a window at the MDC Brooklyn federal jail.
His lawyer, Natali Todd, sought a 45-year sentence, arguing that Saenz didn’t have the final say when it came to authorizing the murders, and describing his childhood of poverty and domestic abuse in El Salvador before he was groomed to join MS-13 while attending Islip High School.
“Alexi was offered friendship and familiarity with kids from El Salvador. At first, there was no indication that any of them were engaged in criminal conduct or were associates or members of MS-13. That discovery would come much later when it was too late,” she wrote in an April filing.
In 2020, then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr authorized prosecutors to seek the death penalty against the Saenz brothers, but President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, withdrew that authorization in November 2023.
“Alexi Saenz led an unspeakable reign of terror, killing and crime that damaged his community and cost several people their lives,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said Wednesday. “My office and our law enforcement partners will continue to work tirelessly to hold the MS-13 and its members accountable for their horrific acts, including the pain they’ve caused victims and their loved ones.”
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