EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – A Mexican judge has sentenced a young man to 150 years in prison after finding him guilty of killing six people in the winter of 2023.
Jorge Manuel C.E., who was 18 at the time, and an accomplice who remains a minor, on Feb. 8, 2023, allegedly were given guns and a red pickup by members of an unidentified gang to “execute” several people in the Urbivilla del Prado neighborhood in Juarez, Mexico.
Between 11:30 p.m. and midnight, the teen sicarios (hitmen) visited four homes, killed three men on the scene, mortally wounded a fourth and chased and gunned down another two, the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office said in a statement Thursday.
Juarez municipal police officers on the lookout for the red truck arrested Jorge Manuel C.E. and the minor near the last crime scene.
A judge ordered the convicted murderer to serve his sentence at Cereso No. 3 prison in south Juarez. He also ordered him to pay 9.5 million pesos in reparations, or about $473,000.
The other suspect has not been named and has not faced trial because he is still underage.
Chihuahua Attorney General Cesar Jauregui and state Public Safety Secretary Gilberto Loya for the past few years have been warning that criminal gangs are increasingly hiring teenagers and minors to “execute” rivals under the assumption they will not be tried as adults or will be given lenient sentences.
Jorge Nava, a former deputy attorney general, told Border Report the cartels who are trying to build a domestic illegal drug consumption market in Juarez often pay these teenagers as little as $150 per hit or give them a bag of crystal meth if they are addicts.
Juarez last year recorded more than 1,100 homicides and is on pace to match or surpass that figure this year. Police have recorded 957 murders through November 7 — an average of three per day.
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