A wannabe MS-13 member who used his girlfriend to lure a 17-year-old boy to his death in Queens got 45 years behind bars Tuesday, after a judge savaged his lawyer’s argument that he was the “least culpable” person in the teen’s gory death.
Juan Amaya-Ramirez was 20 years old and hoping a murder would earn him a spot in the notorious gang when he and two others beat, choked and stabbed teen victim Andy Peralta to death on April 13, 2018.
But his lawyer, Richard Palma, tried to downplay his client’s “seemingly half-hearted attempts” at choking the victim, despite an autopsy showing Peralta died of manual strangulation.
“It is mind-blowing to this court that you could argue that, when that young man died of strangulation, and your client strangled him,” Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Lashann DeArcy Hall said Tuesday.
“He put his hands around his throat, and he strangled him to death.”
Andy Peralta
Amaya-Ramierez, now 27, “savored” his role in Peralta’s slaughter, keeping a photo of the body on his phone, which he showed to his gangbanger pals, and repeatedly bragged about the killing so he could get into MS-13, federal prosecutors said.
“This was a plot to kill a child, someone who was a stranger,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Siegel told Brooklyn Federal Court Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall on Tuesday. “No one ordered them to do this. There was no clique leader, there was no clique. There were no orders from El Salvador.”
Prosecutors were seeking a 50-year sentence, while Palma was hoping for a more lenient 30-year term.
As part of his plea deal, Amaya-Ramierez could have received between 30 years and life.
Peralta’s parents, who sat in the courtroom, huddled close as they watched the proceedings, both asked the judge to hand down a harsh sentence.
“To kill a person in the way that he did, I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” the teen’s mother, Rosa Jaramillo, said. “As a mother, it’s so painful for me to arrive at home and not see him there … I just want everyone to understand the pain that I suffer.”
Rosa Jaramillo and Edgar Peralta, parents of Andy Peralta, are pictured in front of their home in Queens on April 27, 2018. (David Wexler for New York Daily News)
As a teen, Peralta hung out with young members of the rival 18th Street Gang at school, but stepped away from them when he found a girlfriend. They got matching tattoos, him a blue king’s crown, her a red queen’s crown, on their chests, according to prosecutors.
In June 2017, before distancing himself from the gang, Peralta’s friends took a Facebook Live video of him and others singing in a car. He made an 18th Street Gang sign in the video.
Somehow, Amaya-Ramirez’s accomplice Oscar Flores-Mejia got his hands on the video, and that led to the aspiring MS-13 members to target Peralta for death. Flores-Mejia is set to be sentenced Wednesday.
Amaya-Ramirez’s girlfriend Leyla Carranza agreed to chat up Peralta on social media and lure him to Kissena Park with the promise of a romantic hookup. She’s serving a 22-year sentence for her role in the killing.
When Peralta arrived, Carranza took his phone and led him to his death. Amaya-Ramirez, Flores-Mejia and a third man, Juan Lazo-Villa surrounded the teen, and Carranza left to wait in her boyfriend’s car. The trio beat him until they became tired, then beat him again when he got up from the ground, the feds said.
Andy Peralta, 17, was murdered in Kissena Park in Flushing, Queens, on Tuesday, April 24, 2018.
After that, Amaya-Ramirez, whose nickname is “Cadaver,” choked Peralta while the other two beat and stomped him, and the teen screamed and begged for his parents with his last breaths, prosecutors said.
Flores-Mejia shoved dirt in Peralta’s mouth to keep him quiet, stabbed him in the back with a kitchen knife and slashed off his crown tattoo on his chest, then handed the knife to Lazo-Villa for him to stab Peralta as well, prosecutors.
They then took a photo of themselves posing with MS-13 hand signs over Peralta’s body, then dragged the teen by his hands to a small body of water and left him facedown in the mud, the feds allege.
In his sentencing submission, Palma denied that Amaya-Ramirez bragged about the killing, and said he was following the lead of one of his accomplices, Oscar Flores-Mejia, who had dreams of starting his own clique within the MS-13 organization.
It was Flores-Mejia who pulled Amaya-Ramirez’s girlfriend, Leyla Carranza, into the plot, and she was a willing recruit, Palma said in a letter to the judge.
“To be sure, the choice Amaya-Ramirez made was catastrophic, but, rather than by any misanthropic malice, it was motivated by his desire to do for his girlfriend who no man had ever done for his mother or sisters, support her choices, consequences be damned,” Palma wrote.
That line, like many of Peralta’s arguments Thursday, backfired before the judge.
“What we all know here is that he was not playing hero to Ms. Carranza,” she said. “He was not the great defender of women that you would like me to believe in your submission.”
The judge pointed out that Amaya-Ramirez was part of the plot before the girlfriend was roped into it.
“If you want to persist with arguments that are patently disproven by the evidence, you can certainly go ahead. I don’t see how it serves your client.”
DeArcy Hall called Palma’s arguments “an inexplicable minimization” of Amaya-Ramirez’s role, “and I can’t let it go.”
