"She thought she'd saved her daughter
from MS-13
by smuggling her to the U.S.
She was wrong."
"Her daughter had been missing for about a month when Maria Reyes hacked into the 15-year-old's Facebook account and discovered the death threats.
"Those guys want to kill you," warned one private message in Spanish. "They have already given permission to take you out."
"Get ready," said another.
The profiles of the people making the threats featured skulls, guns, coffins, and gang signs that Reyes immediately recognized as emblems of Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13. The 36-year-old witnessed the street gang's brutality in El Salvador. And in the summer of 2014, she had sent for her daughter to join her in the United States to escape MS-13.
Now she looked at the threats and realized that she had lost her daughter to the gang after all.
Four weeks later, on Feb. 11, police found Damaris Alexandra Reyes Rivas's body near an industrial park in Springfield, Va. She had been dead for about a month.
Police have arrested 10 people in connection to the gang-related killing, as well as six more for a related slaying - a sobering sign of MS-13's resurgence in the Washington area.
“I didn’t know people like that existed in the United States,” Reyes said of the gang. “I thought it was super safe to have my daughter here with me.”
'Why did you leave me?'
Damaris's life was upended by violence before she was old enough to remember it. In 2005, Maria Reyes was raising her daughter on her own in San Vicente, El Salvador, when she witnesses a bus robbery. She cooperated with police, but then worried the robbers would seek revenge on her.
Reyes fled in the middle of the night, leaving Damaris with her grandmother.
"It was hard to leave her," Reyes said. "I was still breast feeding. But I had to."
She caught buses to the U.S.-Mexico border, then walked six days through the desert. She joined her sister in Maryland, working long hours in a restaurant to send money back to El Salvador. She eventually married and had two boys.
All the while, Reyes watched her daughter grow up on a cellphone screen. For a decade, she saved to bring Damaris to the United States. By the time Damaris was 12, she couldn't wait any longer.
"Gang members coveted her" because of her delicate features and eager smile, Reyes recalled. "They walked behind her in the streets, saying things to her, following her everywhere she went..."
Read entire story @: Washington Post
