MS-13 leader on trial for gruesome murders in Virginia, including young waitress who was shot 16 times

An MS-13 leader is on trial in Virginia for his role in a half-dozen gruesome murders over the last five years, including one in which he and his gang shot a young waitress in the face so many times that her corpse was unrecognizable.

Federal prosecutors say Elmer Alas Candray, a 27-year-old native of El Salvador, became one of the busiest killers in Virginia as he rose through the ranks of the savage gang, which is known for its horrific violence, according to the Washington Post.

But now, he’s facing the music in federal court in Alexandria, where he’s accused of murder, racketeering conspiracy and firearms charges stemming from the six killings, which left five corpses in ritzy Fairfax County, Virginia, and another in Massachusetts, the outlet said.

Prosecutors say the murder case — which would imprison Alas Candray for life if he’s convicted — is the biggest they’ve taken to trial in several years.

Ironically, it could be his own people that do him in.

Of the eight other gang members indicted last year for the slayings, seven pleaded guilty — and five plan to testify against Alas Candray, the one person who allegedly participated in all six killings between 2018 and 2022, the outlet said.

In court, Assistant US Attorney Megan Braun listed the case details while photos of the victims’ brutalized bodies flashed across the TV screens.

In one case, Alas Candray’s crew got angry that people were drinking, smoking and selling drugs in a small patch of woods behind a shopping center about 10 minutes east of Dulles International Airport, which they considered their turf.

The nefarious activity was bringing cops around — so one night in 2019, they sent a message by killing the first person they saw in those woods: 24-year-old Jose Guillen Mejia.

The gangbangers left his bullet-riddled body laying amid a cluster of beer bottles and bullet casings, one detective testified.

The following year, Alas Candray and three others lured Iris Ponce Garcia, a 19-year-old waitress who’d smack-talked MS-13 in a social media video, into the same woods and murdered her.

“They shot Iris 16 times, primarily in the face, leaving her unrecognizable,” Braun told the court.

They killed Rene Pineda Sanchez, 27, two years later in the same place, simply because he hung out in those woods, the Washington Post said.

Gang members beat the man so badly that a medical examiner said he looked like the victim of a car wreck, with ruptured internal organs and a crushed skull that they caved in with a rock.

And in 2022 they clipped one of their own, beating 42-year-old Francisco Avelar Rivera (known as “Papalito”) to death with a baseball bat and stabbing him several times in Seneca Regional Park in Great Falls, Braun added.

The man was known as a heavy drinker who’d inflate his rank within the gang, she said.

That was enough.

“They cut off his head. They cut off his hands. They cut off his arms. They cut off his legs,” Braun said.

“They buried Papalito’s remains in the woods, where they were undiscovered for more than a year.”

The details track considering the gang’s reputation for nearly unrivaled brutality, in which its thousands of members often rely on guns and machete to do their bloody dealings.

Alas Candray has also been accused of participating in the 2021 gangland assassination of rival Santos Antonio Trejo Lemus, as well as the 2018 killing of Kevin Abarca-Choto, 18, in New Bedford, Mass., over unpaid debts, the Washington Post said.

Despite this, Andrew Stewart, Alas Candray’s defense attorney, said prosecutors don’t have the evidence they need to convict him of the crimes.

“These gruesome photos don’t show that Mr. Alas Candray is guilty of these offenses,” Stewart said in his opening statement this week.

He also claimed the five flipped gang members are only trying to shift blame “to serve their own self-interest,” the outlet added.

Meanwhile, prosecutors say they found a kill list — which included Pineda Sanchez’s name — on Alas Candray’s phone.

They also picked up a handgun linked to the shootings when they raided his Manassas, Virginia home — as well as two revolvers, two machetes, a baseball bat, knives and ammunition, Braun said.

MS-13 has thousands of members in El Salvador, where its movements are directed from leaders inside the nation’s prisons, the outlet said.

Although authorities in northern Virginia have convicted dozens of alleged gangbangers for killings, drug deals and human trafficking, their presence in the Capitol region persists.

Alas Candray’s trial will likely last several weeks.