Teen shot dead in Central Islip was 'targeted' by gang, top cop says
Suffolk detectives investigate the death of a teen who was fatally shot in the woods behind a temple on East Suffolk Avenue on Wednesday. Credit: James Carbone
The 15-year-old fatally shot Wednesday in a wooded area in Central Islip was targeted in a gang-related killing, Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said Thursday.
Hart, speaking at an unrelated news conference in Ronkonkoma, declined to identify whether investigators suspect the killing was the work of MS-13 gang members.
“This is absolutely a targeted event and gang-related, so there’s no risk to the public,” Hart said.
But a law enforcement source said the killing had “earmarks” of an MS-13 killing. In the last decade, authorities have attributed at least 50 killings, some of which have occurred in wooded areas in Suffolk and Nassau counties, to the brutal street gang.
This would be the first homicide linked to MS-13 in Suffolk County since four teenage boys were slaughtered with machetes in a Central Islip park in April 2017, though police last year discovered remains of an MS-13 victim they believe was killed in 2015.
Suffolk police have not yet released the name of the victim shot about 3:45 a.m. Wednesday in woods behind a temple on East Suffolk Avenue. Hart said the victim’s identity would be publicly released “very soon.”
Hart declined to answer further questions, citing the ongoing investigation.
“We’re definitely running this down, obviously,” she said.
In a news release Wednesday, Suffolk police said the victim was with three other males in the wood when they were approached by two men “who fired shots.”
Suffolk Homicide Squad Det. Lt. Kevin Beyrer said Wednesday that the four males ran in different directions when the two men approached. Two of them ran to a nearby 7-Eleven and called 911.
The victim was found shot in the woods and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Hart, who headed the FBI’s Long Island office when MS-13 violence on Long Island erupted in September 2016 after the killings of two teenage girls in Brentwood — Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16 — has said the key to containing the gang and working to shut it down is “constant, constant relentless enforcement activity” by the police department and other law enforcement agencies.
“You’ll have a massive takedown and then they’ll be quiet for a while, and I think the trap that some departments fall into is that they take their eye off the ball and then they reconstitute again,” Hart has said in the past.
The slaying recorded in Suffolk last year was likely committed in 2015, police have said. That victim’s remains were found by the FBI in Babylon Village, but police have said the victim disappeared in 2015, when investigators believe he was killed.
The subsequent police crackdown on gangs and the arrests of dozens of suspected gang members alleged to have committed many of the high profile slayings in 2016 and 2017 put a serious dent in the leadership and membership of the gang, authorities say.
Nicole Fuller is Newsday's senior criminal justice reporter. She began working at Newsday in 2012 and previously covered local government.
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