Jury selection is expected Tuesday in the trial of four suspected gang members facing federal charges alleging racketeering and murder on behalf of a San Fernando Valley-based clique of a transnational gang.
One of the charges involves the machete slaying and dismemberment of a man on federal land — the Angeles National Forest.
Angel Amadeo Guzman, Fernando Garcia Parada, Edgard Velasquez and Jose Jonathan Castillo were among nearly two dozen people named in a 12-count indictment brought in 2019 in Los Angeles federal court.
Prosecutors contend the defendants were linked to a March 2017 murder in which the clique’s members allegedly targeted a rival gang member who they believe defaced their gang’s graffiti. After abducting, choking, and driving the victim — identified by the initials as J.S. — to a remote location in the Angeles National Forest, gang members fatally attacked him with a machete, the indictment alleges.
The victim was then allegedly dismembered before one gang member “carved out J.S.’s heart,” and threw his “body parts into a canyon,” according to federal prosecutors.
Formed in the mid-1980s in Los Angeles, the gang has a presence in at least 10 states and several countries abroad. The epicenter of the organization’s “Fulton clique,” prosecutors allege, is in the San Fernando Valley, where El Salvadoran gang members joined with others to carry out the crimes detailed in the indictment.
The arrests were the culmination of a two-year investigation by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Task Force on Violent Gangs, which includes the FBI, Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
Just three of the 22 defendants originally named in the indictment seven years ago were then over the age of 24, prosecutors said, while 16 of the defendants are eligible for the federal death penalty should the Justice Department opt to seek it.
Court documents say young associates of the Fulton clique who strived to become full-fledged members of the gang were required to kill a rival or other adversary to gain initiation.