Background: GoogleMaps screen grab of Second Avenue in Brentwood, New York near a wooded area where MS-13 gang members murdered victim Michael Johnson in an ambush-style attack./Inset: FBI public domain image of MS-13 back tattoo.
MS-13 gang member Jonathan “Kraken” Hernandez was sentenced to 43 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to luring a New York man he believed was part of a rival gang into the woods to smoke marijuana before using a machete to slash him to death.
In a statement from the Department of Justice published Wednesday, prosecutors said Hernandez — who also goes by the alias “Travieso” — deserved the lengthy sentence given the “barbaric” murder.
“This sentence ensures Hernandez will never have an opportunity to brutalize another person again,” acting Suffolk County Police Department commissioner Robert Waring said.
Sentencing documents obtained by Law&Crime show Hernandez pleaded guilty to racketeering charges in 2022 and admitted then that he had a role in Michael Johnson’s murder in Brentwood plus the slaying of another man, Oscar Acosta.
Hernandez, 26, was a member of the Sailors Locos Salvatruchas Westside (Sailors) clique of La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Leaders of that gang, Jairo Saenz and Alexi Saenz, will go on trial this September. The siblings are facing charges for their role in Johnson’s death and at least six other people.
A spate of gang killings cropped up in Brentwood, which is located on Long Island, in 2016 and it began with Johnson’s death that January, investigators said.
Hernandez claimed to recognize Johnson while the man was shopping at a deli and believed he was from a “rival Bloods street gang.”
MS-13 decided to mark Johnson as “food” in short order, a statement of his offense notes.
Hernandez then got the go-ahead from a “clique leader” to lure and kill Johnson. He admitted to following instructions to bring weapons, including a machete and baseball bat, to a wooded area off Second Avenue in Brentwood to do the deed.
Once Johnson was enticed by Hernandez and several other MS-13 gang members to go into a wooded area to smoke marijuana, the violence erupted.
“When he was least expecting it, the MS-13 gang members and associates, including Hernandez, ambushed him from behind — striking Johnson with a baseball bat, stabbing him with a knife and taking turns hacking him with the machete. They fled after hearing police sirens in the area,” court records state.
The murder earned Hernandez and others in the gang a promotion, prosecutors said.
Johnson’s family reported him missing a few days after the attack and his body was eventually found by a passerby.
Hernandez’s defense attorney Michael Bacharach did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime on Thursday. According to Newsday, Bachrach urged leniency for Hernandez at sentencing, telling the presiding judge that Hernandez had a low IQ and that he was essentially swept up into gang life after coming to the U.S. as a teenager from El Salvador. A member of MS-13 killed his brother, Bachrach said.
Prosecutors however say Hernandez’s violence was part of a pattern. After Johnson was killed, Hernandez and his associates met again to “green light” the murder of 19-year-old Oscar Acosta over questions about Acosta’s loyalty to MS-13. Much like with Johnson, Acosta was lured into a secluded swath of woods in Brentwood to smoke marijuana before Hernandez and others attacked him. Acosta was beaten with tree limbs, knocked unconscious, bound and gagged, loaded into the trunk of a car and taken to an even more secluded area behind an abandoned psychiatric hospital.
It was there that Hernandez and other members of MS-13 hauled the 19-year-old out of the trunk and carried him into the woods “where they took turns hacking him to death with a machete,” records show.
Acosta was buried in a shallow grave, reported missing and then found five months later during a search for another MS-13 victim, the Justice Department said.
As a member of MS-13, prosecutors say Hernandez was also involved in the attempted killings of gangsters in the rival “Goon Squad” in 2016.
Using .40 caliber and .45 caliber handguns in the street during an attack in Brentwood that August, prosecutors say shots were fired wildly in a residential neighborhood.
“No one was hit, although a stray bullet entered a neighbor’s house and struck the headboard of a bed in which the neighbor was sleeping,” the Justice Department said this week when announcing Hernandez’s sentence.
He was also involved in distributing cocaine and marijuana. During the time he led his clique, investigators estimate Hernandez distributed roughly 5 to 10 kilograms of marijuana from April 2016 to October 2017 alone.
In 2018, Hernandez was sentenced to 51 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering. This was connected to a vicious attack on two people in 2015 when Hernandez admitted he and other gang members ran up on a group of people they thought were their rivals and then assaulted them with bats and pipes.
The Justice Department noted Wednesday that Hernandez’s 43-year sentence credited him for the time he spent in custody on that charge.
Prosecutors did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Michael Johnson’s family was not available for comment Thursday but at Hernandez’s sentencing Wednesday in New York, Johnson’s father was present, Newsday reported.
George Johnson reportedly addressed Hernandez in court, telling him he had stolen his son from him and that “life is just not the same.”
Hernandez was reportedly emotionless during sentencing but offered a brief apology to George Johnson, Long Island and his own family, through a court-appointed translator.
The sentence was a long time coming.
In a September 2023 letter to the judge handling Hernandez’s case reviewed by Law&Crime on Thursday, George Johnson urged the court to get on with Hernandez’s sentence after multiple adjournments.
“This matter has been adjourned on numerous occasions before and it is unfair to myself and my family that this murderer has not yet faced his punishment. When this horrific incident took place, my son, Michael Johnson, was not given the option of whether he wanted to live or die at the hands of this savage murderer,” George Johnson wrote. “While the sentencing does not bring back my Michael to me, nor is it as much of a penalty as Hernandez deserves, it is the only means I have to receive my justice and somehow, try to make peace with how this could have even possibly have happened in a civilized world.”
He continued: “If Hernandez was man enough to take a life, then he man enough to give up his life.”
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