35 Arrests Made In Weeklong Gang Sweep, NCPD Announces

MINEOLA, NY — 35 people have been arrested over the past week in a county-wide initiative to limit gang activity, Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder and County Executive Bruce Blakeman announced Tuesday. Of those arrests, 15 people were known gang members while 20 were non-gang members with outstanding arrest warrants, Ryder said.

As part of the initiative, police executed three search warrants over the past week, one last Wednesday, Apr. 15, and two Tuesday morning, Apr. 21. In execution of that first search warrant, police arrested six gang members, while five more were arrested Tuesday morning, police said. In total, Ryder said NCPD arrested nine members of the Bloods, two members of the Crips, three members of MS-13 and one member of a Haitian gang known as “Zoe Pound.”

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“This is our gang. Our gang will win every single time,” Ryder said Tuesday.

Blakeman said the extra efforts to stamp out gang activity in the county came after law enforcement had noticed an uptick in recent weeks. Today, the county executive said, he and Ryder were able to announce, "tremendous results" in that initiative.

While the gang sweep was announced just six days after a fatal shooting took the life of a 15-year-old boy in Eisenhower Park Wednesday, Ryder and Blakeman said the arrests announced Tuesday were not connected with the shooting. The investigation into that shooting, police said, is still ongoing.

“We’re comfortable in where we are on that investigation, and we’ll give you the positive results in the next couple of weeks. We have to wait for the forensics to come back,” Ryder said.

Officials called Wednesday night's event a "one-off," in which gang members from the Bronx and Suffolk County met in the middle at Eisenhower Park. That kind of meeting, Ryder said, will not happen again.

Among the arrests announced Tuesday was Keith Estrada, a member of the Crips that faces an attempted murder charge in connection with a stabbing that took place two weeks ago, police said. Also among the arrests were Arianne Henry, Malani Williams, Simone Williams and Lyric Adiansing, all members of the bloods who had gouged out another woman’s eye during a fight, police said.

In other arrests, police said George Wyche was arrested for possession of three handguns, while Damani Brown, Devin Perkins and Audbree Steele were arrested for possession of one handgun each. Wyche, Perkins and Steele are members of the Bloods while Brown is a member of the Crips, police said.

Finally, police announced the deportation of six people, starting with Darwin Fuentes-Castillo, who police said is an MS-13 member with multiple felony arrests on his record. Fuentes-Castillo, Ryder said, will be getting a “free ride back to South America.”

Also in ICE custody after the gang sweep are Christopher Gere, Jadin Jones, Jovon Noel, Isai Maldonado and Luis Miguel Rodriquez-Martinez, police said. Fuentes-Castillo, Maldonado and Rodriquez-Martinez are members of MS-13, while Gere is a member of Zoe Pound, police said. Jones and Noel, police said, are members of the Bloods.

In addition to the arrests, police said they had discovered drugs, a “kilo press" — used to compress drugs into kilograms for storage — and 10 illegal firearms, the last of which were discovered this morning when they executed a pair of search warrants about 500 yards from each other.

While police said they are trying to limit gang activity, Ryder said there was extra consideration in Tuesday morning's search warrant executions: three children lived in one of the homes they were searching, which forced police to wait until just after 8 a.m., when the last child left their home for school.

"We waited until the three separate buses picked up the kids and took them to school," Ryder said. "We would not execute a warrant until the kids were out of the house."

All of the people arrested, Ryder said, will appear in court Tuesday. The non-gang-affiliated arrestees, Ryder said, had outstanding warrants for their arrest.