13-year-old Mykel Mendes is accused of killing his 16 year-old brother in order to take over the family drug business

On December 15, 2008, Jordan Mendes, a junior at Barnstable High School, and Mykel, a 7^th grader, failed to return home from school.

Being concerned, family members and friends went searching for the brothers and the next day police found Jordan’s dead body still burning in a 10-foot grave.

Authorities said that Jordan was shot, and stabbed (27 times), before his body was torched and buried, in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.

Mykel, who was 5 when his father was arrested, became jealous that Jordan was tapped to run the family’s drug business, and pledged to one day take it away from him. 

So, on a cold December night, Mykel, his 13-year-old friend Devin Ribeiro, and his 20-year-old cousin Robert Vacher, robbed Jordan of $10,000, killed him, the rolled his body to the grave they had previously made.

While authorities were questioning him, Ribeiro broke and told them that Vacher was the one who had shot and stabbed Jordan repeatedly in his neck.

Ribeiro said that he and Vacher then rolled Mendes body in a rug and took it to the pit, and the next day brought a container of gasoline and set Mendes’ body on fire.

The day after the killing, authorities said that the boys walked into a BMW dealership and bought a used car with the $10,000

The boy’s father, Manuel Mendes, 33, who is currently incarcerated, ran the largest drug ring on Cape Cod, bringing in large quantities of cocaine to the Island from NY and Boston.

Being incarcerated did not stop the elder Mendes from selling drugs. In 2002, authorities caught Mendes running his drug operation in prison, and he was sentenced, again,  to 35 years on drug trafficking charges.

When their father was arrested, Jordan was 8 and Mykel 5, and authorities said that Jordan started selling OxyContin and cocaine.

Barnstable police Det. Lt. Sean Balcom said back in 2000 when the police broke into his grandmother’s house to arrest his father, Jordan was “staring down some of the SWAT team members, saying we’d better not mess up his room, he was standing right up to us.”

In 2002, his uncle Danuel Mendes—also a drug dealer—was killed

It is also alleged that the boy’s grandmother was also a drug dealer.