16-year-old with pickax joined in 2016 killing of 14-year-old, feds say. He’s sentenced
A 16-year-old with a pickax helped stab and kill a 14-year-old in the Virginia woods in 2016, federal officials say.
Now, Edwin Orellana Caballero has been sentenced to 25 years in prison, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Virginia said in a Feb. 28 news release.
McClatchy News reached out to Orellana Caballero’s attorney on March 1 and did not immediately receive a response.
Orellana Caballero was one of 17 people facing charges in the death of 14-year-old Sergio Anthony Arita Triminio, who officials say was a member of the MS-13 gang in Virginia.
The slain teen was in juvenile detention in August 2016 and was released shortly after he turned 14, officials said in a position on sentencing document.
Following a rumor that he was released from detention early, gang members began to suspect the boy was an informant, and someone gave the green light to kill him, according to prosecutors.
On Sept. 26, 2016, they lured him to the woods in Fairfax County on the premise of a meeting, then they “stabbed and hacked the victim to death,” officials said.
Orellana Caballero was initially on lookout but was later invited to join the group in the “slaughtering,” prosecutors said.
Someone handed him a pickax, and he hit the boy multiple times, officials said. Other members are accused of using machetes and knives to kill the teen.
The force of some of the blows shattered his skull into over a dozen pieces, authorities reported.
They buried his body in a shallow grave, then removed him as a friend on Facebook, officials said.
Prosecutors pushed to try Orellana Caballero as an adult.
His defense argued he was coerced into participating in the acts, in part by the violent “discipline” the gang displayed toward its own members, his attorney said in his position on sentencing.
Officials said the 16-year-old was not an “unwilling accomplice.”
“Sergio’s life was nothing more to the defendant than a means to his end of advancing to the next rung up on the ladder,” prosecutors said.
In November 2023, Orellana Caballero pleaded guilty to one charge of maiming in aid of racketeering activity.
The charge carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison, but his attorney pushed for a sentence of less than 20 years.
He argued the sentencing guidelines do not “account for the compulsion created by membership in this particular gang. That compulsion is only enhanced when the member in question, like defendant, is still a minor surrounded by and subject to the dictates of older, hardened gang enforcers.”
In addition to serving 25 years in prison, Orellana Caballero was ordered to pay the slain boy’s mother $28,215 in restitution.
Fairfax County borders Washington, D.C., to the west.
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