The cycle of violence, retribution and attempts at justice transfixed Long Island for years.
On Sept. 14, 2016, the body of Kayla Cuevas was found, bludgeoned to death by members of MS-13 and left beside a house at 6 Ray Court in Brentwood.
Two years later exactly, her mother, Evelyn Rodriguez, who had become a renowned anti-gang activist, was run down on Ray Court by the homeowner’s daughter. The daughter, Annmarie Drago, had grown weary of unceasing memorials near the property, prosecutors said.
The prosecution of Ms. Drago followed a byzantine nearly six-year path of conviction, reversal and retrial as attention seeped away and Ms. Rodriguez’s family fell to pieces. On Tuesday, the case appears set to end in a Suffolk County courtroom, with Ms. Drago, 63, likely to receive no more jail time than the one week she already has served.
For Kelsey Cuevas, 26, Kayla’s sister and the sole survivor of a tight triad of women, it has been a torturous ordeal with an unjust ending.
She has struggled to reassemble her life while raising two young children who will grow up without their aunt or grandmother. She lives on Long Island but refuses to say where, terrified that the gang will come after her. On some days, she still picks up the phone to call her mother, forgetting that she’s gone.
“Being diagnosed with PTSD, I just feel like there’s a part of me that’s like just really loose,” she said on a recent morning, taking a long drag from a spliff as she spoke.
Ms. Rodriguez’s death has left Ms. Cuevas with a haunting feeling that her mother died fighting for justice but will be denied it herself.
“When does it end?” Ms. Cuevas said. “When can I sit here and grieve in peace?”
‘A mother on a mission’
Brentwood, a predominantly Hispanic hamlet in Suffolk County, about 45 miles east of Manhattan, was a hot spot for MS-13, a transnational gang founded in the late 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in California. By the time of Kayla Cuevas’s death in September 2016, violence had gripped the town, including a spate of gruesome murders of teenagers.
Kayla, 16, had been feuding with gang members at school and on social media, prosecutors said. After going missing, she and a friend, Nisa Mickens, 15, were discovered next to the modest, slate blue house on Ray Court. The girls had been beaten to death with baseball bats and machetes.
Ms. Rodriguez, 50, harnessed the full force of her maternal grief and sprang into action. Morning after morning, she knocked on doors, searching for answers about Kayla’s death. She haunted the Suffolk County Police Department.
“She was a mother on a mission,” said Barbara Medina, an anti-gang activist. “I don’t even think she mourned her daughter. I think she was just so focused on finding justice.”
Ms. Rodriguez went to local and federal officials, and eventually, to then-President Donald J. Trump, who had seized on Kayla’s case in his administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. She met with Mr. Trump during a visit to Long Island and attended the 2018 State of the Union address as his guest.
By the spring after Kayla was killed, gang members involved in her murder were arrested in a federal sweep. Across Brentwood, MS-13’s activity was beginning to diminish, in part thanks to Ms. Rodriguez’s advocacy, said Peter King, a former Republican congressman who helped facilitate a meeting with Mr. Trump.
“She was definitely the heroine of that movement,” he said.
The sidewalk in front of 6 Ray Court had become the site of frequent memorials, the street cluttered with plush animals and flickering candles, large groups of mourners nursing alcoholic drinks. Again and again, detritus was strewed outside the house. Again and again, Ms. Drago had cleaned it up.
Ms. Drago’s mother had grown weary of the gatherings and moved out, leaving her daughter to fix up the house and sell it, her lawyers said.
Death on a sunny day
It was brilliantly sunny on Sept. 14, 2018, the second anniversary of Kayla’s death.
By the time Ms. Rodriguez and her partner, Freddy Cuevas, arrived at 6 Ray Court at about 4 p.m., the memorial she had set up hours earlier was gone, dismantled by Ms. Drago. The large floral wreath. The balloons. Even the photo board of Kayla, her slender face smiling from behind a junior R.O.T.C. uniform.
Ms. Drago was pulling out of the driveway with the mementos in her white Nissan Rogue. A local news crew captured the nightmarish moments that followed.
Ms. Rodriguez hovered beside the driver’s side window, pointing furiously and demanding the items back. She took a quick step, and Ms. Drago hit the gas. Then the screams began. Ms. Drago had struck Ms. Rodriguez’s foot with her front tire, pulling her to the pavement, and then she drove over her, prosecutors said. Ms. Rodriguez’s skull was fractured.
Miles away, Ms. Cuevas was on her way to buy candles for the vigil when she noticed a torrent of police cars speeding down the highway. Ray Court was taped off. Ten minutes after Ms. Cuevas arrived at the hospital, Ms. Rodriguez was pronounced dead.
In November 2018, Timothy D. Sini, then the Suffolk County district attorney, announced an indictment of Ms. Drago on charges of criminally negligent homicide, the lowest level of felony, which carries a maximum sentence of four years.
In February 2020, Ms. Drago was tried in a courtroom packed with Brentwood residents. The video of the fatal accident was played over and over. Ms. Cuevas, who was pregnant, refused to leave the courtroom for days on end, even when her contractions started. She gave birth days later.
The jury convicted Ms. Drago, and in March 2021, she was sentenced to nine months behind bars. A week later, she was released on bail pending her appeal. The judge cited her lack of criminal history and post-traumatic stress disorder related to her job as a nurse in a psychiatric ward.
That appeal paid off 16 months later: A higher court overturned Ms. Drago’s conviction and ordered a new trial on the grounds that a prosecutor had made improper comments and inflamed the jury’s emotions during closing arguments. The prosecutor, it ruled, had made claims about Ms. Drago’s conduct that went beyond the charges.
When Ms. Drago returned to court in 2023 to stand trial before a new judge and jury, her lawyer, Matthew Hereth, described Ms. Rodriguez’s death in closing arguments as a “tragic accident, nothing more.”
This time, the jury convicted Ms. Drago of misdemeanor larceny for taking items from the memorial. But they deadlocked on the homicide charge, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial on that accusation and leaving Ms. Cuevas, her family and Ms. Drago in excruciating limbo.
‘The law don’t do what it’s supposed to do.’
Ms. Cuevas was bracing for still another trial, but that day never came.
In May, Ms. Drago pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide, admitting that she had hit the gas and fatally struck Ms. Rodriguez, according to court documents. Prosecutors asked in court for a sentence as long as three years, but Justice Richard Ambro said he would be likely to impose five years of probation.
Ms. Cuevas sees the outcome as a failure of a justice system that treats Hispanic families poorly: “The law don’t do what it’s supposed to do,” Ms. Cuevas said, adding: “She got everything she wanted. And she’s in no trouble.”
The Suffolk County district attorney’s office last month declined to comment on the case. “My office is committed to continue Ms. Rodriguez’s fight,” Raymond A. Tierney, Mr. Sini’s successor, said in a statement after the plea.
Ms. Drago could not be reached by email or at numbers listed under her name. Her current lawyer, Mr. Hereth, declined to comment.
“She was just torn apart by this whole thing,” said Stephen Kunken, Ms. Drago’s previous lawyer.
No chance to mourn
On a morning in July, Ms. Cuevas stared out the window of her car. Tucked into the felted ceiling was a $20 bill on which someone had scrawled the name “Kayla” in pen — a sign she took as good luck.
Ms. Cuevas had been 18 when her sister died, and she grew up fast after that, raising two children while contending with the dissolution of her own family.
Freddy Cuevas, Kelsey and Kayla’s father, who had witnessed Ms. Rodriguez’s death, suffered a stroke shortly after. The family no longer lives in the Brentwood home where Ms. Cuevas grew up; it fractured and dispersed, and she no longer speaks to her father.
The trials have forced her to relive — and rewatch — her mother’s death in agonizing detail. “I feel like I haven’t mourned my mom yet,” she said.
Ms. Rodriguez had a way of soothing life’s pains, Ms. Cuevas said. She could be hard on her in that way of mothers and daughters, always pushing her forward. She still looms large in her life, and Ms. Cuevas said she still tries to make her proud.
The house on Ray Court stands quiet, though it is painted beige now, and the driveway is full of unfamiliar cars. Sometimes, when she’s in Brentwood, Ms. Cuevas drives by it, and the memories flood back.
“I have days when it feels like that day all over again,” she said softly. “That’s what makes it so hard.”
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