A member of the violent MS-13 gang on the lam for nearly three years after a stabbing was caught after investigators found a clue that gave him away: his Facebook profile.
Fairfax County police had been searching for 20-year-old Pride Arguis Arriola Najar in connection with a November 2008 triple stabbing. He was apprehended in Louisiana last week, after detectives traced him to a New Orleans suburb due to his Facebook page, according to court documents.
Investigators believed Arriola Najar fled Northern Virginia after the Falls Church-area stabbing on Nov. 7, 2008, but couldn’t track him down. Arriola Najar is accused of stabbing three men in an apparently gang-related incident, said Officer Don Gotthardt, a Fairfax County police spokesman. Arriola Najarwas wanted on charges of malicious wounding and gang participation.
“All attempts to find him resulted in nothing,” Gotthardt said.
Until an online profile gave him away.
Investigators “recently” learned that he was maintaining a Facebook profile, where he listed his town as New Orleans, according to a complaint filed in federal court in Alexandria, charging Arriola Najar with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Investigators matched the phone number in his profile to a New Orleans suburb, court records say.
He was taken into custody without incident on Tuesday in an apartment building in Covington, La., said Peter Carr, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Court documents say the stabbing was the result of a dispute between Arriola Najar’s MS-13 gang and the Culmore City/7Cs gang. No one suffered life-threatening injuries in the altercation, Gotthardt said.
In May 2009, a witness told investigators that Arriola Najar left the Falls Church area after the stabbing, according to court documents. In August 2010, another witness told authorities that he had not seen Arriola Najar for months, the documents say.
Arriola Najar is in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service, Gotthardt said.
