A LONG WALK FROM HONDURAS – Inside one young man’s quest to remain in New York City, rather than be returned to the violent setting he fled by foot nearly two years ago.

At 16, Daniel Sierra Cruz admired the 18th Street gang that controlled his hillside neighborhood in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Their fashionable clothes, flashy phones and cars made gang members the envy of the younger crowd. He knew some gang members from the neighborhood and others from school, and after a year of tagging along with them, they asked him to help with a few tasks. His first mission: to deliver drugs to high-ranking members incarcerated outside the city. Soon enough, he was regularly serving as a scout during drug sales in parks and dance clubs.

“Life is just easier when you’re with them. They told us that with them we could earn in one day what we would earn in one week after finishing school and finding a regular job,” Daniel, now 19, said while sitting on bench in Bryant Park one recent day in Manhattan, where he now lives with an uncle and his family.

Once when gang members solicited volunteers for a robbery, Daniel dodged the call. But when the proposition resurfaced weeks later, he left Tegucigalpa and traveled alone to his grandparents’ house outside the capital. He hoped the two months he stayed there would ease the pressure he felt to participate in the crimes. Shortly after he returned, while sitting on the front step of a corner house the gang inhabited, other gang rookies relayed stories of the bloody fate of recruits who had refused gang dictates or simply failed to inform the gang of their whereabouts. The stories, Daniel knew, were warnings.”*

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