Four members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua quietly stood up in Manhattan federal court on Wednesday and said the one word that locks in their fate: guilty. The men admitted to charges tied to a May 24, 2024 street shooting outside a Bronx apartment building that left two people dead and a third wounded, a crime that federal prosecutors say sits at the center of a far-reaching national case against the crew.
Keiber Jaen Martinez, Samuel Gonzalez Castro, Eferson Morillo-Gomez and Keineyer Ibarra-Mujica each pleaded guilty to two counts of murder through the use of a firearm and one count of using a firearm during a crime of violence before U.S. District Judge Denise L. Cote, according to the Tampa Free Press. Prosecutors say every defendant now faces a potential life sentence on the murder counts, along with a mandatory additional five-year term for the firearms charge.
Case and victims
Prosecutors say the shooting unfolded near 2290 Davidson Avenue in the Bronx, where 44-year-old Claretha LaQuesha Daniels and 36-year-old Justin Lawless were gunned down and a third unarmed victim was shot and survived. Federal authorities later folded the violence into a larger racketeering case, unsealing a superseding indictment in September 2025 that alleges a racketeering conspiracy and includes murder-in-aid-of-racketeering and related firearms charges, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, SDNY.
Wider investigation
Officials say the Bronx case is just one piece of a broader federal push against Tren de Aragua that has swept up alleged members across the country. In a national summary of the crackdown, the Department of Justice reported that recent operations have turned up more than 80 firearms and multiple types of narcotics, and that since January 20, 2025, federal prosecutors have charged more than 260 alleged members and associates of the gang.
What’s next
Sentencing dates for Martinez, Gonzalez Castro, Morillo-Gomez and Ibarra-Mujica have not yet been set. Judge Cote will schedule those hearings only after presentence reports and related filings are complete. The Tampa Free Press notes that these pleas follow a string of earlier guilty pleas by other defendants in the same Southern District of New York case, and that another defendant, Jarwin Valero-Calderon, pleaded guilty last week to racketeering conspiracy and firearm charges tied to a September 2024 armed carjacking.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch and federal prosecutors publicly thanked the teams that worked the case and said the convictions are another step toward dismantling Tren de Aragua’s operations, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. For neighbors on Davidson Avenue and for the families of Daniels and Lawless, the guilty pleas offer at least a measure of closure while the larger racketeering and trafficking allegations continue to move through federal courts.
