Criminal Non-White Violence Accompanies Immigration Invasion

The computer, its screen blank, sat on a table in the living room of Gloria Gomez’s apartment. Two blocks away, four young people had been shot, three fatally, and now Ms. Gomez’s two sons were being hunted by the authorities.


She did not want to believe that her boys could have played a role in the killings, but she consented to turn on the computer, which one of her sons had brought into the house recently, while she was away visiting her native Nicaragua.


In seconds, the monitor filled with a blue-and-white wallpaper emblazoned with gang names, including that of MS-13, the notorious gang from El Salvador that has taken hold in a handful of cities across the United States. With a click, there was more: photographs of her 16-year-old drinking beer and Cognac, and making distinctive hand gestures signaling his allegiance to, or affection for, MS-13.


There was even a picture of him with two of the other teenagers the police have identified as suspects, seated in the bleachers of the very schoolyard where the killings later took place. Their fingers are splayed in V’s, thumb and pinky extended, in classic gang signs, and one is wearing across his face a bandana of blue and white, the colors of MS-13. “Oh, my God,” Ms. Gomez said in Spanish.


In the 10 days since the shootings, with three people in custody and three others the subject of an intense search stretching down the East Coast to Virginia, a rough and disturbing portrait is taking shape of the mixed band of men and boys, of immigrant felons and local teenagers, who, whatever their real gang affiliations, certainly considered themselves a crew of their own.


An illegal immigrant from Peru, Jose Lachira Carranza (illustration), 28, possessed of a temper and a growing rap sheet, appears to have directed the group of a half-dozen or more — answered to like a boss. The group pulled off petty stickups in the elevators and parking lots of the sprawling Ivy Hill Park Apartments in the West Ward, according to interviews with relatives, friends and victims, who say the crew extorted people for quick cash, sometimes slipped through apartment doors cracked barely open by frightened residents.


Over the years, Mr. Carranza and Rodolfo Godinez, 24, who is Ms. Gomez’s other son, were each arrested at least twice on serious charges. But together they also carried off crimes under the radar, their victims say. One time, they surrounded Jason Toomer, 20, intending to give him the beating of his life, he said, mistakenly thinking he had stolen a cellphone from a member of the group.


Mr. Toomer said: “They drink, smoke and drink, and then come out here and harass and rob whoever they want. It’s real nasty, evil stuff, man.”


The complex is known locally as a United Nations of sorts. The Ivy Hill Park Apartments, built in 1952, comprise 10 15-story buildings spread out over more than half a mile of one of Newark’s safer and most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Its 10,000 residents now include people from as many as 40 countries, according to the private complex’s managers. There are Central Americans, Pakistanis, Indians. Most recently, single men from Honduras have been cramming into apartments and finding day work.