Sweeping gang murder case to wrap up in Montgomery County

The grieving mother had come to trust the two detectives, one a tall Anglo, the other a short Salvadoran. They asked how much she really wanted to hear.

“Lo quiero saber todo,” she said.

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I want to know it all.

In the three years since she was told, Montgomery County prosecutors have secured eight first-degree murder convictions in the brutal killing of her son, 15-year-old Dennys Guzman-Saenz, making it one of the largest such cases in Maryland history. The final chapter is set for this month, when the last defendant is scheduled to be sentenced in Montgomery Circuit Court.

But for Dennys’s mother, Maxima Saenz-Sorto, the anguish has not waned. Her thoughts are dominated by grief over how Dennys lived and anger over how he died: Abducted from a Langley Park bus stop on a cold winter night, he was dragged into a blue Honda, wedged into the back-seat floor, beaten and taken into Montgomery. The attackers stabbed Dennys more than 50 times, first with a switchblade-type weapon and then a 14-inch hunting knife that pierced deep into his 130-pound body. When it was over — in a darkened park, 20 miles from Dennys’s home — they threw his body into a freezing creek.

“I would like to grab them and make them suffer just like my son suffered,” Saenz-Sorto said recently, speaking through a translator as she sat on her living room sofa. As she tried to describe the night Dennys disappeared, she gasped for air and slumped to her left side.

One daughter, Suleyma, steadied her. The other, Cindy, got a bottle of rubbing alcohol and held it under her mother’s nose — a routine that pulled her out of another fainting spell. “I really don’t know what to tell her,” Suleyma said. “It’s horrible.”

In many ways, it’s hard to imagine a more horrible crime — one that prosecutors, detectives and family members agreed to speak about in a series of interviews this summer. The following account also relies on court records.

Saenz-Sorto emigrated from El Salvador in 2000, leaving behind Dennys, Suleyma and Cindy. She worried about Dennys falling prey to Salvadoran gangs. “I thought he was going to be in danger there,” she said.

She saved enough money from her job cleaning apartments to bring them to live with her in Langley Park, in Prince George’s County just east of the Montgomery line. Dennys liked American shopping malls and video games, and he began to excel as a swift midfielder on a soccer team. But he was hardly away from gangs.

By late 2008, neighborhood members of Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS-13, were actively recruiting Dennys, said Montgomery Detective Larry Haley. Dennys avoided parties where the gang members might be. He refused to join a planned attack on another gang, leading an MS-13 member to call him a sissy.

“He was getting pressure to join — and in that neighborhood, how could he not?” said Montgomery prosecutor Jeffrey Wennar. “But we found absolutely no information he ever did.”

Just after 7 p.m. on Jan. 18, 2009 — with no school the next day — Dennys walked from his family’s apartment to catch a bus to a friend’s house. He waited in the cold, finally calling Cindy to ask their cousin to pick him up and give him a ride. The cousin headed out to get him.