A brother of one of the four MS-13 gang members charged with the 2003 slaying of a 17-year-old pregnant girl testified yesterday that he was not convinced that she was “snitching” to police about the gang.
Joaquin Grande-Chavez, 20, told a jury that he remained unconvinced of the accusations against Brenda “Smiley” Paz, even after he found her diaries and police officers’ name cards about a month before she was killed.
“We were really good friends,” Mr. Grande-Chavez said of Miss Paz, who he added had been his brother’s girlfriend at one point.
Mr. Grande-Chavez testified in U.S. District Court in Alexandria during the trial for his older brother Oscar Antonio Grande, 21, who with Denis Rivera, 21, Oscar Alexander Garcia-Orellana, 31, and Ismael Juarez Cisneros, 25, are charged with killing Miss Paz.
The four suspects are members of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13 — the largest street gang in Northern Virginia.
Rivera is accused of ordering the other three defendants from his jail cell to kill Miss Paz. At the time of her slaying, Rivera was awaiting trial in the slaying of a rival gang member.
Prosecutors say the four men knew that Miss Paz was talking to police and that she was going to be a witness in Rivera’s murder trial. Each faces capital murder and four other charges. They could receive the death penalty if convicted.
Miss Paz had been in a witness-protection program in Virginia in 2002, but disappeared early in 2003. She turned up in Minnesota, where, Mr. Grande-Chavez said, she called him. He and two others went to visit her, but he didn’t know that she was in danger, he testified.
Mr. Grande-Chavez told the jury that Miss Paz indicated to him that she was lonely and bored, and “at the last minute, she decided to come back” to Northern Virginia. That’s when, he said, he found and took her diaries and police cards.
“My brother was in it,” he told the jury, referring to the notebooks that he passed on to others.
Miss Paz was killed July 13, 2003, a day after an MS-13 party at a Holiday Inn in Fairfax. She had been choked and stabbed 16 times. Her body was found on the north fork of the Shenandoah River on July 17, 2003.
Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, Mr. Grande-Chavez indicated he thought Miss Paz might have been killed by other MS-13 gangs.
During a July 12, 2003, MS-13 meeting at the Holiday Inn, a letter written by Juan “Junior” Flores, of Texas, stated that “Miss Paz was snaking” and there was a green light on her, calling for her slaying, Mr. Grande-Chavez testified.
He told the jury that he, his brother, Mr. Cisneros and Mr. Garcia-Orellana were at the Holiday Inn that night, but that when he woke up the next morning, “a lot of people were missing.”
Mr. Grande-Chavez also testified that his brother often drove a white sport utility vehicle, which prosecutors have linked to Miss Paz’s disappearance.
The next time he saw his brother, Mr. Grande-Chavez asked him about Miss Paz’s whereabouts. “He laughed,” Mr. Grande-Chavez told the jury. “She was gone.”
Like several others who testified against the men yesterday, Mr. Grande-Chavez is in jail under federal attorneys’ directions for his protection. If released, the witnesses said, they might be killed by MS-13 members or deported to El Salvador, where other MS-13 gangs would kill them.
Luis Membreno-Baradona, 30, testifying in Spanish, told the jury via an interpreter that he came to the United States to work and began hanging out with MS-13 in 1999. He testified he heard that Garcia-Orellana held Miss Paz around the neck while Mr. Grande and Mr. Cisneros stabbed her.
Membreno-Baradona testified that he was in jail for two grand larceny convictions and could be deported if released. He said he would be killed if he returned to El Salvador.
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