One of the killers wanted for a double fatal shooting at a Brooklyn migrant shelter – part of a violent Venezuelan migrant gang war that has left three dead – has been charged, police said Friday.
Jorge Said Benitez Villa, 26 and homeless, was charged Thursday with two counts of murder in the deaths of two fellow Venezuelan migrants, police said.
Enny de Jesus Urbina Mendez, 21, died shortly after the Sunday night shooting after being rushed to Bellevue Hospital. The second victim, Francisco Fuentes Rangel, 59, was shot in the head and taken to NewYork-Presyterian Methodist Hospital, where he died Tuesday. Police announced his death Friday.
“The 59-year-old guy had nothing to do with it. He only sit down drinking and enjoying,” one witness, who wanted to be identified only as Angel, told the Daily News after the shooting. “There were two guys on motorcycles with masks on. It’s scary.”
Police said Benitez Villa was the wheel man in the double murder.
As Villa pulled up on a moped in front of the shelter – on Ryerson St. near Park Ave. in Clinton Hill – his passenger got off, opened fire, then got back on the moped, with the two driving off.
But as they escaped, Benitez Villa crashed about six blocks away near Park Ave. and Taaffe Place and was seriously injured, police said. He is still hospitalized, with his arraignment not yet scheduled. The shooter, a recent Venezuelan migrant still being sought, ran off.
Seven minutes earlier, in a related murder, a gunman opened fire from a blue vehicle. killing Arturo Jose Rodriguez Marcano, 30, two blocks away at the Steuben Playground near Flushing Ave. and Steuben St.
The shootings happened amid growing tensions between the Venezuelan-based Trend de Aragua and a splinter gang, Anti-Tren, police sources said.
Mendez is a Venezuelan national who came to the U.S. about a year ago through San Diego. Since moving to the city, he has been arrested repeatedly for shoplifting, mostly in Manhattan, cops said.
Beginning as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly become a transnational criminal organization that is expanding throughout the Western Hemisphere, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The gang is known for human smuggling and sex trafficking as well as money laundering and drug dealing.
Last month, Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, who was arrested for shooting two Queens police officers after being caught zipping the wrong way down a one-way Queens street on a scooter, admitted to authorities that he is a member of Tren de Aragua. He told authorities it wasn’t a big deal for gang members and police in his native country to shoot at each other.
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