mother searches MS-13’s ‘killing fields’ for missing son

To dig deeper into the violent presence of the MS-13 street gang in Long Island’s immigrant communities and the efforts to combat it, Newsday has teamed with ProPublica, the independent, nonprofit investigative news organization and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes since its start in 2008.

The result is a series of extensive articles, beginning today with a probe by Hannah Dreier of ProPublica into one mother’s search for her missing son. The account, told through the disturbing recollections of Carlota Moran, is the most complete offered by any of the families of 11 high schoolers from Suffolk County to disappear during the killing spree linked to MS-13 in 2016 and ’17.

As well as capturing her anguish, it raises serious questions about how well the Suffolk County Police Department performed and whether those issues extend to other cases. The department said it could not comment on the ongoing investigation into what happened to Moran’s son, Miguel.

Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini, who was Suffolk police commissioner at the time of Miguel’s disappearance, also declined to discuss specifics of the case. But he said police, working closely with the FBI, have built more than 30 federal racketeering cases against MS-13 members and made street arrests of more than 240 gang members since September 2016. He said the department has also invested heavily in gang prevention and intervention and has improved relations with the Brentwood community.

The detective first assigned to the case declined at least a dozen requests for his side of the story.

This article will be followed in coming weeks by others by Newsday reporters exploring life within the gang, police efforts to improve relations with the immigrant community against a history of criticism and mistrust, and the complicated effects on those communities of the gang, the law enforcement crackdown against it, and the policies and rhetoric of the Trump era.