WashPost Front-Pager on Chandra Levy Murder Scrubs Illegal-Alien Information

May 25th, 2015 8:19 AM

Even when they revisit the Chandra Levy murder case, The Washington Post keeps scrubbing out the fact that the convicted murderer, Ingmar Guandique, a Salvadoran, is an illegal immigrant (and in some stories, a gang member with the vicious Salvardoran gang MS-13).

It happened again in a front-page story on Saturday on a new trial for Guandique by Keith L. Alexander and and Mary Pat Flaherty, with 1,080 words but no usage of “illegal immigrant” anywhere:

The man convicted in the 2001 killing of federal intern Chandra Levy is likely to get a new trial after prosecutors on Friday dropped their long-standing opposition to defense efforts to have a new jury hear the case.

Since 2013, attorneys for Ingmar Guandique, 34, have argued that a key witness in the 2010 trial had lied when he testified that Guandique, his onetime cellmate, confessed to him that he killed Levy.

Guandique’s attorneys with the District’s Public Defender Service contend that the defense should have been told that the witness, a convicted drug dealer and gang member, had been cooperating with prosecutors in other cases. They said he made up the alleged confession from Guandique to gain favor with prosecutors.

Levy, 24, went missing May 1, 2001, and her remains were found a year later in Rock Creek Park, where she had gone jogging. The young woman’s disappearance and killing emerged as one of Washington’s most sensational murder cases when it was discovered that she had had an affair with Gary A. Condit, a married congressman who was 30 years her senior. Condit was the first suspect and later was cleared.

Guandique is identified as a “gang member” himself in the Saturday story, but the name of MS-13 is left out. NB's Ken Shepherd pointed this habit out in 2010.