Shocking video shows a team of armed men storming a Colorado apartment building believed to be overrun by a dangerous Venezuelan prison gang.
The group of heavily armed men — three with handguns and one with a rifle — enter the struggling apartment complex in the Denver suburb of Aurora and burst into a unit, the clip obtained by KDVR shows.
The footage was captured earlier this month, shortly before a shooting at The Edge complex in Lowry that seriously injured one person and damaged several cars, according to the local news station.
Another video taken at a different time shows two men violently hitting the lock of a home with a tire iron inside the same housing complex, where migrants have moved in.
Recent crimes committed in the building have left residents on edge.
“It’s been a nightmare and I can’t wait to get out of here,” Cindy Romero told KDVR as she left the building with her husband Edward.
The couple said the violence began when a large number of migrants moved into the building.
They used five locks on their apartment door from top to bottom as well as a door bar security device.
“Every day when we come home, we have to do this every time we go out to take out the trash,” Cindy explains, turning each lock. “Every time we go to bed at night. We have to do it this way so no one can break down the door.”
Their car was one of the vehicles riddled with bullets after the shooting.
The Romeros had tried to move to a safer location, but said they couldn’t get the help they needed to do so.
“We couldn’t get any help. We tried to contact rescue agencies, but they told us that since it wasn’t a condemned building, we had to wait for it to happen, but we didn’t want to wait,” Edward Romero told the local station.
They were eventually able to pack up and leave with the help of Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky, who has been outspoken about the influx of suspected members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua into the suburb of 390,000.
“The nonprofits in the city have stepped up to help the migrants who have arrived here, but no one is helping the Americans who are stuck in these apartment complexes,” Jurinsky told the news station.[And] “It’s not just Americans who are affected. Other Venezuelans are victims of extortion by this gang.”
The council member spoke to the Post earlier Wednesday about the suffering in her community caused by the overflow of Denver’s new migrant population — and the resulting Tren de Aragua gang members.
“To our governor and mayor of Denver, I refuse to be silent. I refuse to play politics with you on this migrant crisis. And I will continue to speak out and help as many people as I can,” she said.
Denver, a sanctuary city, has welcomed the highest number of migrants per capita in the country with more than 40,000 new arrivals since December 2022.
Just east of Denver, Aurora itself has seen an influx of migrants and crimes attributed to the Tren de Aragua, a prison gang that originated in the Aragua region of Venezuela.
The gang infiltrated several states and other major cities such as New York and Chicago after crossing the southern border of the United States.
Several high-profile crimes, including the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley and the shooting of two NYPD officers in the Big Apple in June, have been linked to members of this violent gang.
