By working with the police, he could have escaped the gang and started fresh. Under normal circumstances, Henry’s choice would have been his salvation.
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President Trump had seized on MS-13 as a symbol of the dangers of immigration, referring to parts of Long Island as “bloodstained killing fields.” Police were desperately looking for informants who could help them crack how the gang worked and make arrests. MS-13 was in the midst of a convulsion of violence that claimed 25 lives in Long Island over the past two years. Henry’s cooperation was a coup for law enforcement. He decided to help the FBI arrest his fellow gang members. So after a childhood spent in fear, Henry made the first choice he considered truly his own. They could connect him to the FBI, which could protect him and move him far from Long Island. But the officer assured Henry that the Suffolk County police were not like the cops he had known before he sought asylum in the United States. In El Salvador, Henry had learned to distrust the police, who often worked for rival gangs or paramilitary death squads. Then he walked up to his teacher’s desk and turned them in.Ī week later, Henry was called to the principal’s office to speak with the police officer assigned to the school. He tore out the pages and hid them inside another assignment, like a message in a bottle. If he stayed in the gang, he knew he would die. So, to live a little longer, I had to do it.īut now, Henry wrote, he wanted to escape the life that had followed him from El Salvador. And if Henry didn’t kill the man, the gang would kill them both. I’m too tired to do this one.” He said the devil was there in the grove and needed fresh blood. “Your first killing will be hard,” El Destroyer told him. El Destroyer traced his index finger on the trembling man to show Henry where to cut: first the throat, then across the stomach. It was sharper, with more teeth, than the one he used for chores at home. Now he was 12, standing in the coconut grove, and it was time to complete the final initiation rite. Henry hunched over his notebook, oblivious to the kids around him. He eventually settled on Triste, the Spanish word for “sad.” What you become when your parents abandon you as a toddler and go to America and leave you behind in a slum. They also beat him for 13 seconds - an initiation ritual - and asked him to choose a gang name. Then the gang started asking him to come to shootouts, to help show strength in numbers. In exchange, Henry had delivered messages and served as a lookout. He wanted Henry to kill the blindfolded man.įor years, the gang had paid for Henry’s school uniforms, protected him from rival gangs, and given his grandmother meat for the family. A double-edged machete glinted in his hand.
He was in his 60s, with the letters MS tattooed on his face, chest, and back. Then the gang’s leader, El Destroyer, stepped forward. All around him were members of MS-13, urging him on. In front of him was a blindfolded man, strung up between two trees, arms and legs splayed in the shape of an X. He was transported back to a sprawling coconut grove near his grandfather’s home in El Salvador. But with an arm shielding his notebook, Henry was lost in what was turning out to be an autobiography. And now they were demanding that he join in the rampage.Ĭlassmates craned their necks to see what he was working on so furiously. The gang Henry belonged to, MS-13, had already killed five students from Brentwood High School. It would have read like a journal entry by any 17-year-old, except this one detailed murders, committed with machetes, in the suburbs of Long Island. He began with how he was feeling: anxious, pressured, not good enough. So he pulled his hoodie over his earphones, cranked up a Spanish ballad, and started to write. A skinny kid with a shaggy haircut, he had been thinking a lot about his life and about how it might end.
If Henry is killed, his death can be traced to a quiet moment in the fall of 2016, when he sat slouched in his usual seat by the door in 11th-grade English class.