MS-13 gangsters in Charlotte sentenced to prison in murder, racketeering cases

Yahoo

17-04-2025

Three MS-13 gang members were sentenced Wednesday to decades in prison, the result of ongoing efforts to rid the region of violent criminal organizations, federal authorities said.
Federal District Court Judge Mike Urbanski sentenced two men to 35 years for shooting a man to death in a Charlotte nightclub.
After their imprisonment, they will be turned over to immigration authorities for removal from the United States because they do not have legal status to be in the country, Urbanski said Wednesday.
Another man was sentenced to 17 years in prison for racketeering conspiracy (RICO) involving the kidnapping a teenager. That will be followed by three years of supervised release.
'This case has dismantled the local MS-13 clique, and we're not done,' United States Attorney Russ Ferguson said in a statement. 'Our goal is not just to prosecute violent gangs, but to eliminate them completely.'
In September, Christian Alejandro Garcia Santa Cruz, 32, of El Salvador, and Aderly Jose Veliz-Ronquillo, 30, of Guatemala, pleaded guilty to killing a man outside a Charlotte nightclub in November 2022.
The two members of the La Mara Salvatrucha gang, better known as MS-13, got into an argument with Wilson Edgardo Gutierrez Mejia on Nov. 6, federal prosecutor Erik Lindahl said. Santa Cruz and Veliz-Ronquillo were out with a group that night, the prosecutor said.
Lindahl said Gutierrez Mejia shoved a gang member, Veliz-Ronquillo pulled out a gun and shot him in the head and Santa Cruz shot him three more times once he hit the ground. The killing offered them a chance at promotion within MS-13, Lindahl said.
They were arrested in Annapolis, Maryland, Lindahl said.
Neither had been convicted of a crime before. Memoranda provided by their attorneys to the court laid out Santa Cruz's harsh circumstances growing up in El Salvador and Veliz-Ronquillo's work history, among other things. Defense attorneys for the men acknowledged the crime's severity.
'This is just a heinous crime — a senseless crime,' Urbanski said.
The plea deal the two men agreed to called for a longer prison stay than usual for their conviction, but other charges were dismissed. Had they been convicted of other crimes they were charged with, the minimum sentence would be life in prison.
'The young man that is present, right there, is a coward,' Gutierrez Mejia's father told the court with a translator's help during Santa Cruz's sentencing.
He said his grandchildren still ask, 'Daddy, where are you?'
He has trouble dealing with that, the father said.
After Veliz-Ronquillo's sentencing, Urbanski approached the father.
'I'm a father, too, and I know how hard this is for you,' the judge told him.
The father buried his face into a pew's rail and sobbed.
Another defendant, Luis Fernando Guardardo Moreno, received 17 years in prison and three years on supervised release for his role in kidnapping a 17-year-old and holding her for ransom.
It happened in February 2022, Lindahl said.
MS-13 gangster Guardardo Moreno and other gang members rushed a man, beat him and took his Acura, the prosecutor said. A co-defendant forced a 17-year-old into the car, he said. They held her for ransom money, but she escaped, Lindahl said.
Guardardo Moreno told the court he regretted his part in it.
'I regret my actions,' he said. 'I regret breaking the law. I regret it from the bottom of my heart.'
The defendants were members of an MS-13 clique known as the Hollywood Locos Salvatrucha Clique (HLS clique), which operated in North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of North Carolina.
Other MS-13 members who have pleaded guilty to crimes in the Charlotte area are awaiting sentencing, according to the news release.