A lookout for a 2015 gang murder received 34 years in prison for what a Maryland prosecutor called “a savage killing.”
Police found a body buried in a shallow grave in Germantown two years ago. Only by chance did they identify the victim as 34-year-old Marvin Vargas-Osorio.
“He was a common laborer and he had, on the job several years earlier, using a nail gun, had shot himself in the foot with a nail gun,” Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy said.
What appeared to be a metal pin in one of his feet was noted in the autopsy.
Edwin Reyes-Martinez was a 17-year-old Gaithersburg High School freshman at the time. He confessed and pleaded guilty, saying he was the lookout who kept watch as gang members lured Osorio into the woods and stabbed him 27 times. Martinez was also involved in another murder after he came to Montgomery County from El Salvador, McCarthy said.
“He was here 8 months, and in 8 months, this validated member of MS-13 was involved in two killings in our county,” he said. "Obviously, we have spoken about our concern of rising gang violence in the county in particular, specifically rising gang violence as it relates to MS-13."
The murder may have been a gang initiation, prosecutors said.
