657: The Runaways
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MS-13. President Trump talks about him a lot. He's mentioned them a hundred ninety-eight times since he became president, according to one database of everything that he said publicly. Here he is in Nashville in May. This vicious gang has transformed one's peaceful, beautiful communities that I know so well. I know them all. Into blood-stained, killing fields, savagely murdering, raping, and mutilating their victims. The communities he knows well were on Long Island, near where he grew up in Queens. MS-13 is a particularly brutal gang, originally formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by immigrants and refugees from Central America. The weapons of choice tend to be machetees and baseball bats. And MS-13 has been especially violent lately on Long Island. Last year the president spoke there at Suffolk County Community College. The audience was filled with law enforcement of various kinds, immigration and customs officials, FBI agents, members of the local police and address uniforms and white gloves. And the president praised law enforcement for doing a great job eradicating MS-13. Resting gang members, throwing them in jail, deporting them. And I want to just tell you all together right now, and the reason I came, this is the most important sentence to me, on behalf of the American people. I want to say thank you. Thank you very much. At this speech, he shook hands with officers from the Suffolk County Police Department. Our story today is about the police department, and it documents the opposite. It documents some failing repeatedly in fighting MS-13, particularly when the victims were Latino immigrant kids. In the end, there were 18 murders in 16 months. Literary teenagers were disappearing, and for a long time, the Suffolk County police did very good with an investigate, made the same mistakes over and over, missed clues, missed bleeds, brushed aside distraught parents who were looking for their kids, parents who had information that might have been helpful. A investigative reporter, Hannah Dryer from Pope Publica, has spent the last year in Suffolk County, reporting on MS-13 and the police there, and she's found pervasive problems in how the Suffolk County Police Department treats Latinos in general, problems which dramatically slowed their response to this MS-13 murder spree. And let's just get right to it. From W.B. E.C. Chicago, it's This American Life, here's Hannah Dryer. The first teenager who was murdered was Miguel Garcia Moran. His family always teased his mom, Carlota, over how overprotective she was. When Miguel was a toddler back in Ecuador, she put chicken wire around their house to keep him from running down the street. When the family got green cards and moved to Suffolk County, she imposed a strict 10 p.m. curfew. And when he wanted to play video games at a neighbor's house on a cold Friday afternoon in February of 2016, Carlota drove him there a few blocks away, even though he had just turned 15 and could have walked over. Carlota got home later that evening around 730 with some dinner for Miguel. She called out his name. When he didn't answer, she felt a jolt of alarm. She texted him to ask where he was. No response. She texted him a third, a fourth, a fifth time. By midnight, Carlota's stomach was clenched with dread. Miguel never failed to let her know where he was. He never missed his curfew. He was even too afraid to go to sleepovers. By 2 a.m. she couldn't wait any longer. She and her boyfriend, Abraham Chaparro, got in the car and started driving. I was like, where is Miguel? What happened to Miguel? He calls me every 5 every 10 minutes. But during all those hours, they seemed so long and I didn't know whether I should scream or cry. I just felt like I was losing the
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