Josselin Ramirez is a convicted felon and a member of MS-13. In July 2018 she was sentenced to 95 years in prison for her involvement in three armed robberies of Washington D.C area businesses. Ramirez also confessed to setting the murders of a policeman and a rival gang member in her native, El Salvador.

On Thursday, July 5, 2018, Josselin Ramirez was sentenced to 95 years in prison for her role in three armed robberies committed by MS-13 in the Washington D.C area.

Josselin Ramirez’s sentence from Montgomery County Circuit Courthouse Judge John Maloney was for three counts of Conspiracy to commit armed robbery (20 years maximum for each) and three counts of participating in a gang-related crime (15 Incomes policy for each) for a total of 95 years in prison. The length of Ramirez’s sentence will be reconsidered in five years. She would be up for parole after serving 25 percent of the total sentence which would be 23.75 years.

A grand jury indicted Josselin Ramirez in January 2018, and she later pleaded guilty over three robberies she participated in on Sept. 1, Sept. 22 and Nov. 3, according to a statement from the Montgomery County state’s attorney.

The incidents were September robberies of a food truck between Wheaton and Rockville, MD., and of an Exxon gas station in the area, then a Nov. 3 robbery at a cellphone and check cashing operation in downtown Wheaton. The Exxon robbery was the largest of those, with $120,000 taken, police said.

The robbery suspects were caught Nov. 3 after police spotted them during a stakeout and pursued them onto the Capital Beltway and their van crashed. One suspect, police say, was killed when he fled the disabled van and was struck by a police car.

Prosecutors in Montgomery County had tied Josselin Ramirez to an armed MS-13 robbery crew, showing that she helped them case businesses ahead of heists and cleaned the weapons to remove evidence after the robberies. Jurors had watched a video of Ramirez speaking to detectives about her earlier gang life in her native El Salvador and about how she had lured a policeman there into a deadly MS-13 ambush. “He was shot in the head,” she said.

The robbery crew with which Josselin Ramirez is associated is suspected in more than a half-dozen robberies in the Washington region.

Four or five armed members of the crew would enter a business and be out within minutes.

Josselin Ramirez joined MS-13 as a teenager, according to evidence at her trial.

“How old were you?” she was asked in Spanish during a police interview.

“I was 13,” she said, according to the evidence.

She admitted to helping MS-13 kill a policeman in El Salvador and helping kill a rival gang member there, trial evidence showed.

Clarke said she was drawn back into gang activity when an associate in the United States encountered her and recruited her, and she eventually had a child with him.

Assistant State’s Attorney Teresa Casafranca said Ramirez “willingly embraced the violence that is MS-13,” adding that she never told police that she was forced or coerced back into gang activity.

Casafranca said that although Josselin Ramirez could be deported, the state would have no way to control her actions or prevent her from returning to the United States.

Maloney, the judge, said he was puzzled about why Ramirez would commit such “horrific crimes” if she had intended to leave that lifestyle behind.

“You embraced the lifestyle again.

It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m having trouble understanding,” Maloney said.

“You need to be housed away so you can’t harm others.”

At the time of her arrest last year, Josselin Ramirez was living in Alexandria, Virginia, having just moved from Temple Hills, Maryland, according to court records. She had begun living in the area several years earlier, after coming from El Salvador in 2013, according to court files. Immigration officials said that she was living in the United States illegally.

Ramirez had made a telephone call from jail to her mother in the week of the trial. “She indicated that she was going to be found guilty,” Assistant State’s Attorney Patrick Mays said at the time of Ramirez’s plea, describing the contents of the recording. “And she was going to jail for quite some time, that there were photographs.”

The photos, Mays said during the plea, showed Josselin Ramirez holding guns, including one weapon that was used in a robbery. Other photos showed Ramirez displaying MS-13 gang signs, prosecutors said.

In statements after her arrest in the robberies, trial evidence showed, Josselin Ramirez had said gang life in El Salvador “was very ugly” and that “things are very different over there.”

Josselin Ramirez crossed into Texas in October 2013 and reached Northern Virginia three months later, trial evidence showed. According to the Washington Post, Ramirez is likely to eventually face deportation proceedings.