An MS-13 gang member known as “Diablita” — Little Devil — will spend 50 years behind bars for luring three teens and a young man to a Long Island park to be hacked to death.
Leniz Escobar, 24, was sentenced in Long Island Federal Court Tuesday for her role in the gruesome April 11, 2017 slayings. A federal jury found her guilty of murder and racketeering in 2022.
“The defendant demonstrated her allegiance to the MS-13 gang by luring four young men to their slaughter,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Tuesday.
The killers targeted their four victims, plus a fifth who got away, because they were photographed flashing MS-13 signs despite not actually being in the gang.
The MS-13 members believed their targets were members of the rival 18th St. Gang, and were flashing the signs as an insult — and that slight had to be answered with death.
Escobar and a second teen, Kayli Gomez, who was 17 at the time, drove the men to a wooded area of a Central Islip park and into the clutches of an MS-13 mob armed with knives, machetes, wooden clubs and an ax.
The gang butchered Justin Llivicura, 16, Michael Lopez, 20, Jorge Tigre, 18, and Jefferson Villalobos, 18, and left their bodies in the woods.
Gomez testified at Escobar’s 2022 trial, as did Sergio Vladimir Segovia-Pineda, who told jurors how his weapon in the quadruple killing was a chisel. Gomez and Segovia-Pineda both pleaded guilty in the case prior to their testimony.
In the days after the killings, Escobar bragged about what she’d done to other MS-13 members, and was caught on a recorded call with her boyfriend describing how “four individuals took the train and who knows when they’ll be back, got me?”
She added, “But one of them, one of them managed to still be here on the map … he knows stuff about me.” In another call, she told her boyfriend, a ranking member of the MS-13’s Brentwood clique, that she was “happy for this to happen,” prosecutors said.
More than a dozen people have been charged with the killings, and Escobar is the fifth to be sentenced.