MS-13 graffiti marks a highway bridge in Springfield, Virginia.
Shannon Sanchez had gotten away from MS-13. After hanging around with the gang in high school, she married and had four children.
But as an adult, she fell back in with MS-13 and helped cover up a savage gang murder.
On Friday, the Leesburg, Virginia, woman was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria to 70 months in prison. After four MS-13 members stabbed a rival gang member to death in a West Virginia quarry two years ago, Sanchez burned their clothes and gave them bleach to clean the bloody knife. She retraced their steps in her van, the one they used to drive 18-year-old Carlos Otero Henriquez to his death, looking for surveillance cameras.
"Words cannot express the remorse and sorrow that I feel," Sanchez, 36, told Otero Henriquez's mother Friday. "I wish I could give your son back to you."
To her own children, who sat in court, Sanchez apologized as well. "Don't let my mistakes determine your path in life," she said.
Defense attorney Thomas Walsh said Sanchez reconnected with the gang after her husband went to prison. For one daughter's quinceanera party, she looked to invite boys to dance with the girls. A friend of one child brought a group that included Dublas Lazo, a high-ranking member of a local MS-13 clique.
Sanchez began renting the basement of her Leesburg home to gang members. So many were soon gathering at her house that police installed a pole camera across the street.
But Walsh said in court Friday that Sanchez acted not as an enabler but a maternal presence. She helped three members get out of the gang with their lives, Walsh said, including one whose fingers had been cut off with a machete.
At the same time, she developed feelings for Lazo, an FBI informant who went on to help kill Otero Henriquez.
When Lazo and other gang members asked to borrow her van on the night of May 21, 2016, Sanchez agreed. When they came back covered in blood, she helped them clean up.
Walsh claimed that Sanchez was unaware of what exactly had happened until missing posters for Otero Henriquez appeared in the neighborhood a few days later. But even then, she did not confess to the police who repeatedly interviewed her. Instead, she tried to disable the navigation system in her car and went looking for security cameras along the route the murderers took that night.
"When the inevitable occurred, she chose the gang," Assistant U.S. Attorney Tobias Tobler said in court Friday. "Through her blind loyalty, she helped prolong the agony of a family looking for their missing son."
A week after the murder, Tobler added, Sanchez became romantically involved with one of the other killers: Daniel Oswaldo Flores-Maravilla.
Walsh said Sanchez acted not out of loyalty but fear. While she pleaded guilty to her crime, she did not cooperate with law enforcement out of fear for her life, he said, adding that she continues to get death threats in jail.
"Had she just cooperated with the police, I'm not sure she'd be alive," he said in court.
Judge Liam O'Grady said he appreciated the good that Sanchez had done - but he also cited the bad.
"I give you full credit for trying to convince people to leave when you thought they were of an age to do so," he said. "You just are someone, too, who chose to put yourself in the middle of all this gang activity."
Sanchez's sister is now caring for her children.
Three of the gang members involved in the murder cooperated and testified at trial against five others; all eight were convicted.
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