MS-13 gang member sentenced to more than 43 years in prison for 2 murders, other crimes

George Johnson stared at Jonathan Hernandez, one of the MS-13 members who killed his son in 2016, and told him that he had waited a long time to tell him how deeply the murder of his child has ripped apart his family.

He had stolen his son Michael Johnson from his brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, Johnson said as he looked at Hernandez, sitting just a few feet away in a Central Islip federal courtroom. He had stolen a son from a father.

“Life is just not the same,” the grieving dad told Hernandez, who showed no emotion as he stared back, unblinking.

U.S. District Court Judge Gary R. Brown on Wednesday sentenced Hernandez, 26, to 520 months in prison — more than 43 years — for his role in the January 2016 slaying of Michael Johnson, 29, the April 2016 killing of 19-year Oscar Acosta and other crimes.

Johnson asked Brown to sentence Hernandez to the maximum penalty — life in prison — but later said “I got justice today.”

Hernandez expressed remorse for his role in Johnson’s death through his attorney, Michael Bachrach, and in a statement to the court through a Spanish translator.

“I would like to apologize to the father of the victim,” Hernandez said. “I would like to apologize to the community of Long Island. I would like to apologize to my family. That is all.”

Hernandez, also known as “Kraken” and “Travieso,” pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in May 2022, acknowledging his role in the murders of Johnson and Acosta. Other acts related to the racketeering charges included the attempted murder of suspected gang rivals in August 2016 and his participation in an MS-13 conspiracy to distribute marijuana and cocaine.

Prosecutors said Hernandez was a member of the Brentwood-based Sailors clique of MS-13, led by brothers Jairo and Alexi Saenz, who are scheduled to go on trial in Central Islip federal court on Sept. 3 for the murders of Johnson and other victims as well as other charges. They face up to life in prison if convicted.

Johnson’s slaying in Brentwood was the first of seven murders committed by the Sailors clique, according to prosecutors.

The killings included the September 2016 killings of Brentwood teens Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens. Cuevas’ mother Evelyn Rodriguez became an anti-gang activist and received nationwide attention for speaking out against MS-13. She was a guest of former President Donald Trump at his 2018 State of the Union speech and met again with Trump later that year when he visited Brentwood to discuss gang violence with local leaders. Rodriguez was killed when she was struck by a car in 2018.

“Today’s sentence is the result of choices the defendant made to commit serious crimes on behalf of the Sailors clique of the MS-13, including the brutal premeditated murders of two young men, assaults with dangerous weapons, attempted murders, and the distribution of drugs,” said Breon Peace, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “The substantial period of incarceration imposed today will protect the public from more crimes committed by the defendant and it is my hope, deter young men from joining this depraved gang.”

Bachrach asked Brown for a sentence of 324 months, requesting leniency due to his client’s troubled past and intellectual disability. Hernandez left El Salvador for Long Island at age 15 after his brother was murdered by MS-13, he said. The defendant did not get the support he needed and foundered at Brentwood High School, which made him a prime candidate for MS-13’s Sailors clique.

Hernandez’s 74 IQ made him “very prone to being controlled by other, stronger members of MS-13,” Bachrach told Brown.

Prosecutors said Hernandez and other MS-13 members marked Johnson for death after seeing him at a Brentwood deli, believing that he was a member of the rival Bloods gang. MS-13 members lured him to a wooded part of Brentwood, where they told Johnson they would smoke marijuana. Instead, Hernandez and other gang members beat him with a baseball bat, stabbed him with a knife and hacked him with a machete. Hernandez and other MS-13 associates were later promoted by gang leaders for their roles in the attack, prosecutors said.

Acosta was murdered three months later because Hernandez and other Sailors clique members suspected he was associating with the rival 18th Street Gang after previously aligning himself with MS-13. MS-13 members met Acosta near an elementary school in Brentwood, promising to smoke marijuana with him. They brutally beat him, knocking him unconscious, and bound his feet and hands, prosecutors said, before hacking him to death with a machete in Central Islip woods.

CORRECTION: Michael Johnson was killed in 2016. We had the incorrect year in an earlier version of this report.