WASHINGTON — Three gang members were charged on Jan. 29 for first degree assault, child abuse and gang activity after a teenage girl who worked for MS-13 as a prostitute was brutally beaten in a Kensington, Maryland, home which housed more criminal activity.
The alleged attack and other crimes are all said to have occurred in a house not far from the Westfield Wheaton Mall and Einstein High School in the 11209 block of Valley View Avenue.
Official documents say 20-year-old Ivan Pena-Rodriguez, 24-year-old Miguel Ayala-Rivera, and 21-year-old Yervin Romero-Rivera were among five men who used a baseball bat to beat the 15-year-old victim more than two dozen times “for not doing a good job” as a prostitute.
The victim, who was interviewed on the phone by police, would not tell local authorities where she was. She also refused to say that she knew one of her attackers, who was stopped by police in Ocean City during the summer of 2017.
She did admit to knowing about the home and some of the others involved in her beating, which is alleged to have occurred in some woods that separate the neighborhood from Einstein High School.
Two of the suspects involved in the attack are already behind bars after their arrest in a string of check cashing store robberies last fall.
The Kensington-area home where many of the gang members live had been on police radar even before the fall robberies. Two men from Virginia told police that the Kensington home was where they were taken after being lured to a river in Virginia with marijuana then kidnapped in early September 2017.
They believed they were in their final moments alive, but the victims got in touch with a dispatcher via text message after their girlfriends, whom they had texted in the car ride over, contacted police. Police presence in the area deterred any further attack.
In addition, police say a suspect in a quadruple murder in Long Island highlighted by President Trump was also arrested in a raid of that home.
