Izaak Towery was just walking home from a friend's house in Las Vegas when MS-13 grabbed him off the street.
They questioned him in Spanish to find out if he was a rival gang member.
He only spoke English – and that communication gap is why he's dead.
They Called It Hunting: Inside the MS-13 Killing Spree Across California and Nevada
Federal prosecutors just opened a three-month trial in Las Vegas that lays out exactly what MS-13 does inside American cities.
Three gang members – Jose Luis Reynaldo Reyes-Castillo, David Arturo Perez-Manchame, and Joel Vargas-Escobar – are facing a 34-count federal indictment tied to at least 11 killings across California and Nevada.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Melanee Smith told jurors these men didn't stumble into violence.
They went looking for it.
"They went out hunting, looking for people they could kill," Smith said in opening statements.
This is how MS-13 operates – not as a street gang protecting turf, but as a structured criminal enterprise where murder is the promotion system.
Kill enough people, rise high enough in the ranks.
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Towery, 23 years old, was stabbed 235 times and left on a mountain road outside the city.
His body wasn't found for two weeks.
19-year-old Abel Rodriguez, a father, was dragged to a field and stabbed so many times his own family couldn't have recognized him.
Arquimidez Sandoval-Martinez, 21, was snatched from a Las Vegas club in 2018, bound with his own shoelaces, driven into the Nevada desert, and executed.
His body turned up on federal land nearly two weeks later.
The Same Gang Was Hunting in Virginia and New York While Biden Held the Door Open
This trial isn't a one-time horror story.
It's the same pattern that federal prosecutors have documented in Virginia, New York, California, and Maryland for the better part of a decade.
In 2019, an MS-13 leader in Northern Virginia ordered his clique to turn the Washington suburbs into what prosecutors later called a "hunting ground" – gang members patrolling neighborhoods looking for rivals, killing anyone who crossed their path.
On Long Island in 2016, MS-13 chased down two teenage girls, Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, and beat them to death.
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President Trump brought their parents to the State of the Union.
Democrats called it a political stunt.
In Los Angeles, five MS-13 members were convicted of six murders committed to advance their gang standing – victims stabbed, beaten with baseball bats, and thrown off cliffs in the Angeles National Forest.
The Las Vegas defendants operated during 2017 and 2018.
They have been in the federal system since arrests in 2018 after agents found handguns and a large knife in a vehicle linked to the suspects.
That's eight years of proceedings while Towery's family has lived without him.
Trump Designated MS-13 a Foreign Terrorist Organization and the Las Vegas Trial Just Proved Why
MS-13 didn't become this violent after Trump took office.
They were already this violent when the Biden administration spent four years waving people across the border and releasing them into American communities.
President Trump designated MS-13 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization on February 20, 2025 – not a gang, not a criminal enterprise, a terrorist organization.
That designation matters because it gives federal prosecutors and law enforcement tools designed for people who organize mass killing.
That's exactly what this Las Vegas trial proves MS-13 is.
The Trump administration has since deported MS-13 members to El Salvador's CECOT maximum security prison in partnership with President Nayib Bukele – a facility built specifically to hold gang terrorists and keep them from ever reaching another American neighborhood.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin put it plainly: MS-13 murders, rapes, and traffics drugs.
"They maim for sport," she said.
Defense attorneys in Las Vegas are already running the standard playbook – attack the credibility of cooperating witnesses, argue that testimony from fellow gang members is unreliable because they're getting deals for talking.
"The more you squeal, the better the deal," defense attorney Richard Wright told the jury.
That argument dies fast.
Perez-Manchame was reportedly wearing Izaak Towery's blood on his shoes when he was arrested.
Prosecutors say DNA and ballistics back up every witness account.
This trial is what the open border actually produces – not the abstract policy argument Democrats want to have, but 11 families who buried somebody because MS-13 was operating freely inside American cities for years.
Trump saw it coming.
He called them animals, designated them terrorists, and started shipping them to a prison where they can't hunt anybody.
The jury in Las Vegas gets to decide the guilt of three men.
The American people already decided the larger question in November.
Sources:
- Stepheny Price, "Alleged MS-13 trio went 'hunting' in brutal American cross-state killing spree, prosecutors say," Fox News, April 2, 2026.
- Noble Brigham, "They went out hunting: Prosecutors describe brutal killings in federal MS-13 trial," Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 31, 2026.
- "ICE Deports MS-13 Terrorist Gang Leader Wanted for Murder in El Salvador," Department of Homeland Security, November 20, 2025.
- "More Foreign Gang Terrorists Deported Out of America," U.S. Department of State, March 31, 2025.
- "MS-13 Gang Leader Sentenced to 68 Years in Prison for Eight Murders," U.S. Department of Justice – Eastern District of New York, July 2, 2025.
- "What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13," The White House, May 21, 2018.