MIAMI — A fifth person has been arrested in the machete-slaying of a vocational school student who was killed allegedly by his classmates.
Miami-Dade police said Thursday that authorities arrested Joseph Michael Cabrera, 23, of Key Largo in the St. Louis area. It wasn't immediately clear when he will be returned to Florida, nor did police detail the exact charges against him.
Police said Jose Amaya Guardado, 17, was lured in June by fellow students at the Homestead Job Corps school into a nearby wooded area, where he was hacked to death with the machete and buried in a shallow grave.
According to a police report, Guardado was ordered to lie in the shallow grave after the initial attack, but he made one last attempt to fight off the assailants. That's when police say Arbelo struck Amaya Guardado several more times with the machete until his face caved in. The suspects then pushed Amaya Guardado into the grave and buried him, according to the report. Strickland and another suspect stayed behind after the killing to have sex, it added.
The suspects cleaned up the scene, burned the victim's belonging and their own clothes and got rid of the weapon, authorities said.
A prosecutor previously said the case would be presented to a grand jury, which may indict the five suspects on first-degree murder charges that could carry the death penalty.
Guardado's mother said she brought her son to the United States nine years ago to escape the violence rampant in their native El Salvador. But now, his family is mourning his death in what police describe as a brutal machete attack.
"I brought my son from there because they were killing people," Lucia Guardado said, in Spanish, at the family's south Miami-Dade home. "I never imagined they would do something like that to my son here."
Miami-Dade police arrested four other of Guardado's classmates: Kaheem Arbelo, 20; Jonathan Lucas, 18; Christian Colon, 19, and Desiray Strickland, 18.
WJAX
