SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge sentenced a 20-year-old San Francisco man to three years in federal prison, the first sentence handed down in a large-scale 2019 prosecution that targeted the gang known as MS-13, court records show.
Missael Mendoza was sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg. Mendoza pleaded guilty in April to two August 2019 attacks, which prosecutors described as gang beatdowns targeting suspected members of the rival Norteño gang.
Mendoza is a refugee who came to the Bay Area at 17, after suffering through a traumatic childhood that included being kidnapped and discovering the dead bodies of two loved ones who were murdered. He will likely be placed in ICE detention and deported to Honduras after serving his sentence, and faces the prospect of being killed upon his return, his attorney wrote in court records.
Mendoza was one of 17 alleged MS-13 members and associates arrested and charged in 2019 as part of a federal investigation into a subset of the gang. The charges included multiple attempted murders and assaults, violence authorities said was motivated by turf disputes and attempts at extorting drug dealers in San Francisco.
The April plea deal required Mendoza to admit to two gang assaults that occurred on the same August 2019 day, including a group beatdown in the Mission District where the victim suffered a fractured skull. Mendoza also admitted to participating in an “assault” that involved him and others approaching a student outside Jefferson High School and asking him if his red sweatshirt meant he was a Norteño. The group fled when a school official accosted them but Mendoza was holding a “sharp metal object resembling a knife in his hand,” prosecutors said.
Mendoza was not actually jumped into the gang until after he was arrested and sent to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin in 2019, prosecutors said in a sentencing memo. His participation in the earlier violence was intended to prove his worth to the gang, they wrote.
Mendoza’s attorney, K. Alexandra McClure, wrote in court records that he was taking responsibility for a “series of exceedingly poor choices” but that his background shed light on why he became associated with a Bay Area gang.
At age 15, while walking home in Honduras, Mendoza was pistol-whipped and kidnapped by four men who took him to a nearby field to execute him, one of the many atrocities he experienced during his childhood, McClure wrote, adding that he started using marijuana at age 7 to “numb” the pain from his upbringing.
“He was driven to a nearby field to be shot and killed. His brother and some of his friends learned of the kidnapping and arrived just in time to save him,” McClure wrote. “Although he was now ‘safe,’ he watched as his kidnappers were brutally killed. These were only a handful of the violent killings he witnessed in Honduras.”
The following year, his brother was murdered inside his grandmother’s home. He received a phone call thereafter, letting him know, “You’re next,” McClure wrote. He was forced to flee to another town, “only to be found by the men who were hunting him.”
Mendoza continued like this, on the run from his would-be killers, until a neighbor suggested going to the United States. He was arrested by border agents who placed him into custody as an “unaccompanied minor,” McClure wrote.
“He met a pro bono attorney here in San Francisco who accepted his case and helped him prepare his asylum application,” she wrote. “Mr. Mendoza knows, however, that by pleading guilty to these assaults, his chances of receiving asylum are slim and that in all likelihood he will be deported to Honduras.”
