Last week, Loudoun County Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne sentenced Hector Valdami Campos-Aguilar, 19, to 10 years in prison for a September 2008 drive-by shooting that took place in Sterling Park. The gang-related attack wounded three people, leaving one paralyzed.
As part of a plea agreement, Campos-Aguilar was sentenced for unlawful wounding. He was originally charged with three counts of aggravated malicious wounding in the case.
According to prosecutors, Campos-Aguilar along with two other MS-13 members drove up on a group of young men at the intersection of East Poplar Drive and Buckingham Court in Sterling, thinking they were members of the rival 18th Street gang, they turned around and opened fire on the group.
One of the victims was shot in the arm; another was shot in the back, penetrating his spleen; and another was left paralyzed from the waist down from his injuries.
As it turned out, none of the shooting victims were actually gang members.
Campos-Aguilar, came to this country illegally from El Salvador, and has a long criminal record. His record in Fairfax County alone includes convictions for receiving stolen goods, two counts of carrying a concealed weapon, trespassing and assault and battery.
He should be deported upon his release from prison.
In recent years, Northern Virginia has been inundated with illegal alien, and the notoriously violent Salvadoran gang known as MS-13 has emerged as the area’s most prominent gang.
The FBI's National Gang Task Force Director Robert Clifford, said: "The migrant moves and the gang follows. If you follow the construction trade, Â that is where a lot of these immigrants go."
MS-13 set up shop in Northern Virginia during the 1990s, lured by the region's fast-growing Salvadoran population, later expanding into the Maryland suburbs of Langley Park and Gaithersburg.
During 2004-2005, there were two machete attacks in the Northern Virginia area. An Alexandria teenager lost four fingers during a savage encounter with MS-13 members, while a Fairfax man also became a victim of an MS-13 machete attack. Both incidents are believed to have been acts of initiation.
In 2005, two MS-13 members were convicted in an Alexandria, Va. United States District Court for killing a 17-year-old pregnant girl. A rope was placed around the neck of Brenda Paz,, she was then stabbed repeatedly. Her body was left along the muddy banks of the Shenandoah River. The murder was retribution for the girl´s cooperation with a federal investigation into the gang´s activities.
Last month, a jury of nine women and three men found Ingmar Guandique, 29, guilty of first-degree murder in killing of D.C. intern Chandra Levy. Guandique, who speaks no English, heard the verdict through a pair of headphones on which the translation was provided.
A Salvadoran national in this country illegally, Guandique was charged in April 2009 with the murder of the missing intern, who disappeared in 2001. Her skeletal remains were discovered a year later in D.C.’s Rock Creek Park.
According to prosecutors, Guandique murdered Levy on May 1, 2001, raping her along a jogging trail in the park.
At the time of his arrest for the Levy murder, he was already in prison for assaulting two other women in the same park at knifepoint. He is serving a 10-year sentence for that crime.
Gunadique was actually arrested only a few days after Levy’s disappearance on burglary charges, though law enforcement were aware of his illegal status, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not notified due to the District’s sanctuary policy.
In October 2009, Assistant U.S. Attorney Fernando Campoamor told a judge in D.C Superior Court that Guandique, along with members of the MS-13 gang threatened to kill a witness and his family, if he testified at Guandique’s trial.
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