SAN FRANCISCO — A 22-year-old MS-13 member was sentenced this month to 12 years in federal prison for an attempted murder involving a machete, as well as other gang-related assaults, court records show.
Brigido Josue Gonzales Sales, 22, pleaded guilty last September to racketeering conspiracy, attempted murder, and assault. He was sentenced Dec. 6 by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg, records show.
Gonzales Sales, who went by the nicknames “Inocente” and “Kilo,” was indicted in a 2020 move that targeted 17 members of an MS-13 subset known as the 20th Street Clique. A new indictment, filed in 2021, linked the gang to three previously unsolved Bay Area homicides.
Gonzales Sales was jumped into the gang in 2020, but started associating with it two years earlier. In April 2018, he struck a perceived gang rival with a machete several times, and later admitted that he only learned the victim survived after he was arrested and charged in the federal case, years later, according to prosecutors. He also admitted involvement in the beating of a 15-year-old boy and his mother, and to shooting the windows out of an occupied SUV in January 2019.
All three incidents occurred in San Francisco, and were attributable to a rivalry between MS-13 and a Mission District-based subset of the Norteño gang, though police say some of the victims were simply mistaken for gang members.
A defense sentencing memo says Gonzales Sales’ father died at a young age, and that his mother immigrated to the United States from Guatemala — without her sons — after a stalker attempted to burn down the family’s home. When she later returned and brought Gonzales Sales with her, he had spent most of his young life without stability. After dropping out of high school, he “decided that the familial and social support he lacked after his mother returned to Guatemala could be provided by MS-13,” his attorneys wrote.
The 12-year prison term was agreed upon by both the prosecution and defense. In a letter to the court, Gonzales Sales says he regrets his crimes and is coming to terms with how his incarceration will affect his young daughter.
“I will never forgive myself for what my crimes will mean for her life,” Gonzales Sales wrote. “But I will do all I can to help her, to make sure she doesn’t make the mistakes I made, and that she studies hard, works hard, and builds a good life for herself here.”
Several of Gonzales Sales’ co-defendants have already pleaded guilty and been sentenced, including 192 months for Alexis “Zorro” Cruz-Zepeda — who is serving a concurrent life sentence for the 2017 murder of George Martinez in San Francisco — and a 12-year prison term for Oscar “Chuy” Espinal for driving a cohort to stab a perceived rival in 2017.
Source: www.mercurynews.com