The young men had all fled Central America as teens or younger, crossing the United States’ southern border and filtering up to the Baltimore area, where they went to school, worked and passed the time hanging out and smoking marijuana.

They were, according to one defense attorney, “homeless, aimless, troubled and misguided.” But they were also, federal prosecutors say, capable of unspeakable violence as part of their membership in the El Salvadoran gang MS-13.

Last week at the racketeering trial of three alleged gang members, three professed former fellow members took the stand and casually recounted a spree of violence in 2020 that left two teenage girls dead and nearly resulted in the same fate for three other people.

One of them was asked to describe the mood among the group after they’d taken turns stabbing one of the girls to death on a path at the Loch Raven Reservoir. He cracked a wry smile.

“Quiet, and with the devil in our head,” Asael Ezekiel Gonzalez-Merlos said through a translator.

“Were you happy? Were you sad?” the prosecutor asked.

“We were pleased,” he said. “Because everything had turned out well.”

The trial is playing out more than five years after the attacks, amid a pitched spotlight by the Trump administration on immigration and crime. Law enforcement officials say the gang’s local presence, for years largely concentrated in the Washington suburbs and Virginia, has been increasing in the Baltimore area in recent years, as has the scope of the crimes ascribed to its members.

The city is not flooded with MS-13 members. Gang experts with the Baltimore Police Department say they’ve identified 50 to 60 suspected MS-13 members and say the total could be some multiple more, compared with the thousands of immigrants that have helped boost the city’s flagging population. Meanwhile, a Banner analysis this year found that, while President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has doubled arrests in Maryland, 60% of the immigrants arrested had never been convicted of crimes and only 13% had committed violent crimes.

But the gang’s presence here has led to devastating results for those they believed had crossed them. Those who testified at the trial described how they acted as judge, jury and executioner based on flimsy pretenses and with hopes of earning higher standing in the organization.

Wualter Orellana-Hernandez, who was originally indicted in the case and took the stand after pleading guilty, testified he had dated Michelle Elizabeth Tenezaca and knew she had a “9.20.18” tattoo, which would appear to be a date memorializing a particular event in September 2018. He thought nothing of it at the time, he said.

But later, when other members of the gang suggested the “18″ was indicative of allegiance to their sworn rivals, the 18th Street Gang, he didn’t object — and participated in her murder, leaving her dead next to train tracks in Southeast Baltimore.

They also attacked Tenezaca’s sister, who kept her composure on the stand as she detailed how she survived by playing dead as the gang repeatedly stabbed her.

“They started stabbing me; they were asking me questions about what gang me and my sister belonged to,” she said. “I tried to play dead. I couldn’t. I was in pain and breathing faster. And then, the second time I played dead, that’s when they thought I died.”

The last thing she heard before passing out was someone taking her picture — to show to higher-ranking gang members as proof of the crime — and making a phone call seeking to procure replacement clothing for their blood-stained outfits.

There were no reported killings in Baltimore tied to MS-13 until 2020, after some members in the federal case on trial were arrested after a botched execution in Turner Station. Authorities in the city and Baltimore County began stitching together the roles of gang members in the series of crimes from that spring and summer.

Baltimore Police Officer Phillip Smith, who is part of the department’s gang unit, said in an interview that the gang has had a presence in the city since at least 2015. He said it used to be largely contained to Southeast and Northwest Baltimore but has more recently “been popping up everywhere.”

At the same time, Smith said, it has been harder to identify gang members and interact with the city’s Hispanic population “because of the climate of the world today,” alluding to stepped-up immigration enforcement.

Sgt. Troy Blackwell said city police also have seen incidents of violence spread from what had been disputes among rival Hispanic gangs to other groups in the city.

A second federal racketeering indictment against alleged MS-13 members in the city was filed this summer, tying together three murder cases not previously disclosed to be linked.

In the 2020 case in court this month, prosecutors said the former members risked death for going against the gang and testifying against members; defense attorneys said the men were willing to say anything to improve their own sentences and outcomes. At least five U.S. Marshals stood around and between the defendants and the cooperating witnesses, who were separated by mere feet.

It’s unclear how the three cooperators entered the country, but they admitted to being present without authorization. Anuar Dubon Artiaga, 23, testified that he left Honduras at age 14 by way of Guatemala and Mexico, where he spent a year before entering the U.S. In Arizona, he was taken to a detention center for minors before ending up in California and then Baltimore.

Dubon Artiaga said he was an MS-13 member in Honduras, where he had shot people, sold drugs and collected extortion money, but he disavowed the gang once in the United States. He was lured back in when he arrived in Baltimore. “With them, I had a house, money and drugs,” he said through an interpreter.

He said he hoped that through his cooperation he could avoid being returned to Honduras “because I’m afraid that if I arrive in Honduras I’ll be killed.”

Gonzalez-Merlos, also originally from Guatemala, said he didn’t join MS-13 until arriving in Maryland, when he was attending Parkville High School. He recalled fishing and walking the trails at the Loch Raven Reservoir, which is why it came to mind when looking for a place to kill 16-year-old Gabriela Alejandra Gonzalez-Ardon.

Defense attorney Julie Reamy asked him about a recorded phone call from jail that he had with his mother.

“Your mom wasn’t too happy that you took all this [violence] to your favorite weekend spot, the reservoir,” Reamy said.

“No mother would be happy about something happening to a young girl of 16,” he replied.