Federal prosecutors say more lives will be lost if a Virginia gang leader does not receive the maximum sentence for planning to kill a woman whose testimony in a 2006 murder trial helped put a fellow MS-13 member behind bars for life.
Erick Turcios-Lazo is expected to be sentenced today in Alexandria’s federal court. Prosecutors want a federal judge to put Turcios-Lazo behind bars for 10 years before he is deported for being an illegal immigrant.
By giving Turcios-Lazo the maximum sentence, the judge will help deter other MS-13 members from obstructing law enforcement, prosecutors said in court documents.
“The defendant and his co-conspirators were trying to send a message to fellow gang members not to cooperate with law enforcement,” prosecutors wrote. “If gang members are too frightened to cooperate, the crimes of MS-13 — murders, assaults, thefts and many more — may go unpunished.” Prosecutors added, “If they go unpunished, there will be more of them.”
In January, a jury convicted Turcios-Lazo of conspiracy to commit murder in aid of racketeering. According to court documents, Turcios-Lazo was the leader of a Fairfax County MS-13 cell and the second in command for all of Virginia.
In January 2008, Turcios-Lazo attended MS-13 meetings where he and other gang members discussed killing a fellow member they believed to have been a government witness in the 2006 trial of former cell leader Wilfredo Montoya Baires.
Later that month, Fairfax County police learned from an informant that Turcios-Lazo pushed for the “green light” to murder the “snitch” whom court records list only as “L.Q.”
In September 2006, L.Q. was seen by gang members at Alexandria’s federal court while she was responding to a subpoena to testify in the Baires trial, records said. The January vote taken by members of Turcios-Lazo’s cell in favor of killing L.Q. never played out.
In court filings, prosecutors noted that the gang seemed poised to carry out similar attacks against government witnesses in the future; an MS-13 member related to Turcios-Lazo “attended portions of the trial and observed who was testifying.”
Turcios-Lazo’s attorneys argued only that the four-year sentence he was currently serving in Maryland for being in the country illegally should run concurrently with his racketeering sentence.
Turcios-Lazo was convicted in August of being an illegal immigrant.
