Investigating the Investigators of Long Island's MS-13 Victims
Following reporting by ProPublica, Newsday and This American Life, the Suffolk County Police Department says it’s looking at how they may have mishandled nearly a dozen reports by families of missing teens who ended up victims of the street gang MS-13 in Long Island.
The gruesome story began in January of 2016 when a 15-year-old named Miguel vanished into the woods near his home. What followed were a series of disappearances of teenagers, many of them immigrants, in and around Brentwood. As more young people went missing, desperate parents and families went to the police, but were largely rebuffed by investigators.
"They felt like they were ignored and it wasn’t until these two citizen girls were killed by the gang that police really started paying attention," ProPublica reporter Hannah Dreier told WNYC’s Richard Hake.
When police did start investigating, they turned up bodies of other teenagers who had gone missing.
Now, lawmakers on Long Island are pushing the Suffolk County Police Department to review their own conduct in investigating the cases. However, it remains unclear whether the agency will be able to assess its own performance.
"Advocates out on Long Island say that it’s a really big deal for police to be recognizing that anything went wrong," Dreier said. "But there is some question about whether the police will be able to conduct a real investigation of its own policies and its own failings."
