The friends had liked Gerson Saravia from the start. With his halting English and scrawny arms that stuck out like sticks from the tank tops he wore, he reminded them of themselves when they first came to the U.S., excited but also bewildered and self-conscious.

Jonathan had spotted him at school on Long Island at the start of junior year in 2015. With a poof of curly hair and a wide smile, Jonathan liked to be the first to welcome newcomers at Bellport High. He had come from Honduras in 2013 at age 16 to join his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since he was a small child. The loneliness had been intense, and now he tried to save others from it. He invited Gerson to play in a local soccer league and to go on snack runs to a neighborhood pupusa shop, and teased him for his Salvadoran slang. He introduced him to his best friends, the Morales brothers, from Guatemala, and a Salvadoran-American freshman named Alfred. Soon, Gerson was coming over to their houses after school to play video games.

The night was warm and still. The clearing in the woods was small, but someone had left a chair and tires to sit on. Almost as soon as Jonathan and Alfred arrived with the older man, the attack began. Jonathan heard people rushing through the trees. Then a group emerged dressed in jeans and black sweatshirts, with bandannas covering their faces and machetes glinting in their hands.

Jonathan turned to run, but he tripped after a few steps. As he fell, he felt the first blows land on his back. The shock was so intense it muted everything else. He felt the impact but not the pain as machetes cut into him dozens of times, slicing to the bone. Breathless, he curled into a ball, trying to protect his head with his hands. His blood spattered onto the chair, the tires and the leaves of the oak trees.

The next morning, a neighbor who had a key to the brothers’ house ran in, crying. “They killed Jonathan,” he told them. Alfred got in touch that afternoon. He was in the hospital with a fractured skull and machete wounds all over his body. He said that Jonathan was in a coma, between life and death, and the gang might come for the brothers next.

That weekend, older strangers offered the brothers rides and seemed to be following them home. They sensed that Alfred was right; they were the gang’s next targets.

Jonathan awoke choking on the tubes in his throat. The pain hit him all at once. His mother ran to his side. Then a nurse. Soon, the small room filled with hospital staff and police officers, who had been assigned to guard the door.

It was Monday, three days after the attack. Doctors had cut off Jonathan’s hair while he lay in a coma and pulled his scalp together with more than 100 staples. They had reattached his severed left hand. His arms were in casts down to the fingertips.

When Jonathan returned to school in October 2016, everyone seemed to know about the attack. Classmates told Jonathan they had seen gang members lurking by his house; another said the gang knew Jonathan had talked to police and wanted to kill him. Jonathan’s teachers changed his schedule so he wouldn’t have MS-13 members in his classes, but they sometimes found him between periods and threatened him.

The month after Gerson was sentenced, in April 2017, the macheted bodies of four boys were found in the woods. Two of the victims were Bellport students. Suffolk County police say MS-13 was responsible for some 18 killings in 2016 and 2017. The wave of violence attracted the attention of President Donald Trump, who used it to justify his proposals for tighter border security and a crackdown on immigration.

Asked about Jonathan’s case last year, the Suffolk County police commissioner and his assistant struggled to remember which of the many MS-13 machete attacks was Jonathan’s. Suffolk County Chief of Detectives Gerard Gigante said police believe most of the people who committed that violence have been detained. In a February 2018 interview, he said Jonathan should not give up hope that his attackers could be brought to justice. “You can’t rush it. You need patience. We have time, you know?” he said. “Arrests get made sometimes years later, so the possibility exists. You never know.”

On a chilly morning not long ago, Gerson sat in the cavernous visitor’s center of the Greene Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Now 20 years old, he folded his hands in his lap and spoke in a polite tone for two hours, carefully denying any role in the attack.

At first, he claimed to know less about MS-13 than most students, and even most teachers, at Bellport High. He said he wouldn’t know how to recognize gang members in school and only ever heard about them on the news. He said he had never seen a machete; he acknowledged signing a confession saying he was carrying a machete on the night of the attack, but he said he hadn’t understood it because it was in English.

On July 4, 2018, Emilio’s father, Jose Sanchez, went to wake him up at 3 a.m. Sanchez worked at a bakery, and his son was joining him for the early morning shift for the first time. After searching the house, he went outside and found Emilio lying near the front gate. He shook him, then lifted his hand and saw it was covered in blood. Emilio had been shot to death, his foot still in his bicycle strap.

Sanchez appeared on local news the next day, wiping tears into his sleeve and blaming the gang for his son’s death. “He didn’t want to join,” Sanchez said. The case remains open. Asked about gang violence in the area, Bellport precinct police inspector William Silva said MS-13 is under control. “As far as gangs, I don’t have a problem,” he said. “I have a presence, but it’s manageable and small.”