This 17-year-old boy in El Salvador has been charged with 17 counts of murder. (The judge found insufficient evidence on 10 of the counts. On April, 1999, the judge convicted Gustavo Adolfo, whose full name cannot be published under Salvadoran law because he is a minor, of killing seven people and sentenced him to seven years in prison -- the maximum sentence for a minor for any crime. With good behavior, he could be released in half that.

Gustavo Adolfo says he's innocent, and that he is being persecuted because of fashion, not evidence. "My hands haven't killed," he said at a news conference this month. "The judge doubted me because of my tattoos, my clothes. Nobody believes in me."

Gustavo Adolfo, whom relatives call "Tavo," grew up in a poor neighborhood of San Miguel, 85 miles east of El Salvador's capital. When he was 10, his mother took him out of school because other kids were beating him up daily. By the time he was 13, he says, he entered the world of gangs, many of which are led by U.S. gangsters deported to El Salvador.

His first murder, they say -- and one of those for which he was convicted -- was of a young woman he was dating. He was 14, and she had turned down his sexual advances. According to the prosecutors, Gustavo Adolfo kidnapped her and took her to a hideout, where he raped her, cut off her breasts and threw her -- still barely alive -- into a well, where he left her to die. Prosecutors would not provide details of the six other killings, except to say that several involved rapes.

About 20 families fled the neighborhood where he grew up this month when Gustavo Adolfo, along with seven other minors in a temporary prison, clubbed a guard and made a quick getaway. "I left out of fear and because they warned me that the gang would take away one of my daughters," said one neighbor, who didn't give her name for fear of reprisal.