BRENTWOOD, N.Y. — Angel Soler’s mother brought him to the United States as a young boy, figuring things would surely be better than in Honduras, where he had lived in one of the world’s most violent cities. Javier Castillo’s father made the same calculation when he took his young son out of gang-plagued El Salvador.

Life in the leafy Long Island suburbs of New York didn’t prove to be any safer.

The corpses of the two teenagers, the latest victims of suspected MS-13 gang violence on Long Island, were found a few miles from each other in secluded areas late last month. Police also discovered the remains of another young man, Kerin Pineda, who, like Soler, had formerly attended Freeport High School.

Their fates match those of many of the more than two dozen people believed to have been killed by the gang in the New York suburbs in the past two years: They were Central Americans who came to the United States as children seeking a better life, then vanished, only to be found slain months later.

‘‘Destroyed,’’ Castillo’s distraught father, Santos Ernesto Castillo, said Wednesday outside the funeral home where his son’s wake was being held.

Castillo, who had attended Central Islip High School, was 16 when he vanished on Oct. 11, 2016.

‘‘Over four months, every night we were out looking for him thinking maybe we would see him but that did not happen,’’ his father told reporters in Spanish. ‘‘I though the police were doing something, but they let too much time pass.’’

The teen’s remains were found more than a year later on Oct. 24 in a marshy area of a waterfront park in Freeport, more than 25 miles from his home.

Three days later, authorities located the remains of Kerin Pineda in thick woods near a large pond several miles away.

Pineda’s mother, Lilian Oliva-Santos, told reporters her son was 19 when he vanished in May 2016.

‘‘I brought him from Honduras here thinking everything would be better, here, like we would be safe, but I guess it wasn’t,’’ she told News12 Long Island.

Soler was 15 when he disappeared on July 31 this year. His body was discovered Oct. 19 in a wooded lot in the hamlet of Roosevelt.