The teenager watches listlessly as the agents search his room. The fifteen-year-old doesn’t open his mouth, but his mother bursts into tears when she sees the police find two machetes in her son’s room. The house is just meters from the spot on Calle de Atocha where Jaime Guerrero, a 15-year-old gang member, was killed on February 5 in a clash between rival gangs. Investigators have just put a face to those responsible for this crime. The boy who does not speak is one of them and along with two other minors he was arrested this Wednesday for committing this murder. All three are members of the Dominican band Don’t Play.
The victim was a slim, athletic boy who had barely cleared the acne on his face when he died. He had played in football teams like Móstoles and lived with his family in Vallecas. But about six months before his death, something changed. He stopped going to classes and stopped training. He started getting into trouble. So many that the police came to arrest him for robbery by force. All evidence points to the boy having joined the Trinitarios, one of the two predominant violent youth gangs in Madrid. A decision that dated the end of his life when he was not even 16 years old.
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“We believe that Jaime’s mistake was the worst a gang member could make: he switched gangs. Before becoming a Trinidadian, he was affiliated with or sympathetic to others,” a police source close to the case said. In the unwritten rules of gangs, that’s a death sentence, and that’s what Jaime found outside a nightclub.
Things moved very quickly that night in February when there were at least five other gang fights across the city. The Trinidadians and the DDP found themselves at a party outside a nightclub in Atocha and the confrontation broke out. They all carried guns. In images captured by surveillance cameras and cellphones, gang members can be seen moving up and down the street through the crowd. At first, Jaime appears to walk upstairs, machete in hand, and then change direction. By that time the knife had already been stabbed in his chest. The adrenaline made him stand a few more seconds, but the blood loss was so great that he only took a few steps before collapsing a few yards from the McDonalds on the corner, which is always surrounded by delivery men waiting their turn pick up orders. A few bystanders tried to revive him, but Jaime was already lying on the ground, motionless.
The abundance of witnesses and videos was the key to this case. The raw material that the V Group of Homicides investigators in Madrid had to work with during these months was so plentiful that it was important to distinguish what you saw from what you thought you saw in order not to miss the mark. “There is ample evidence that these three inmates were involved in the murder,” say sources close to the investigation. The juvenile public prosecutor’s office agrees with the investigators and therefore requested accommodation measures for those arrested, but the judge granted two of them a precautionary release on probation and a further full release until the next trial.
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Jaime has long been in the sights of his rivals. A group of DDP had gone to his home in Vallecas weeks before his death to look for him. Those who found them that day were police officers, who identified them and took their guns, although they found no explanation as to why they were loitering in the area that day. The answer came weeks later when they checked the address of the teenager who died in despair at the doors of an Atocha nightclub and found it was very close to where this DDP group had been identified.
In April, another DDP member, Alejandro Pérez, was executed in the street in revenge for Jaime’s death. His Trinidadian enemies tricked him into believing that he had arranged to meet a girl in order to approach him alone and stab him in broad daylight. Just a few days later, police arrested a 14-year-old Trinidadian for causing the stab wound and six others for involvement in the ambush. Pérez had been investigated because he was in Atocha the night Jaime died. In this gang war everyone will be imprisoned or buried.
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