In N.Va. Gang, A Brutal Sense Of Belonging

If Hayner had sometimes been lonely, Spike was never alone. Mara Salvatrucha -- which means "Salvadoran Gang" in Spanish -- is believed to have about 3,500 members in this area, a multinational band of Salvadorans and Hondurans and Mexicans and Nicaraguans and Bolivians, immigrants and the children of immigrants, police said. They are as young as 9 and as old as 35.

"It's like they're a very united family," said one teenage friend, who declined to give her name for fear her parents would punish her for associating with Flores.

Flores floated from one friend's house to another, at one point moving to an apartment on Edsall Road down the street from where paramedics would discover the machete victim, one friend said.

But MS-13 was more than a surrogate family. The group has been associated with violence since its founding in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Young men who had fled El Salvador's civil war banded together at that time to protect themselves from Mexican American and African American gangs. MS-13 later expanded to the East Coast and back to Central America.

In the Washington area, the gang's followers are initiated by being beaten up by other members, police and Flores' friends said. And the gang requires members to take part in vicious attacks, on rivals and on members who violate its rules.

"It's a group mentality. Some of the kids doing it might not be that violent," said Clausen, the former principal. But the gang "doesn't leave them much choice sometimes."

Gradually, Flores' world divided in two: his gang vs. others. He no longer could stay with his parents because rival gang members lived nearby, he told his parents. Trejo recalled driving Flores and a friend to a soccer field one day. Flores suddenly asked whether anyone had a long-sleeve T-shirt. They didn't.

"I'm not staying," Flores announced. A different gang was on the field, and they would spot his tattoos.

Flores' mother suspected he had second thoughts after joining MS-13, and she asked whether she could do something to get him out of the gang.

But he replied: "No one can help me. I'm already inside. I can't leave."

Leaving would be against the rules, and the gang ruthlessly enforced the rules.

One of Flores' friends, Manuel Plazaola-Vargas, was suspected of one of the most serious gang infractions: talking to police. About 2 a.m. April 22, Plazaola-Vargas, a thin Nicaraguan, pulled up at a 7-Eleven on Little River Turnpike to buy a drink, he would later testify at a hearing for Flores in Fairfax County General District Court. When he got out of the car, a voice growled in Spanish: "You are a snitch."

It was Flores, accompanied by two other young men, Plazaola-Vargas testified.

Then the blows started falling. Plazaola-Vargas was hit on the back and stabbed in the ears, neck and shoulder. He was hospitalized.

Flores was charged with malicious wounding after Plazaola-Vargas' testimony this month. Flores has not entered a plea, but his attorney argued that there was insufficient evidence to implicate him in the attack.

Eighteen days later, in a brick house on Edsall Road that has a Virgin Mary in the yard, two dogs started howling. Douglas Quant looked outside to see what had riled his German shepherds at 1 a.m. Across the street, he glimpsed a half-dozen young men, running down the driveway of the Edsall Gardens apartments and up the road. Quant, who is Nicaraguan, recognized the glint of a machete.