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Crime Jul 21, 2022
| Photo courtesy of Maria Charitou/Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
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A man was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for forcibly bringing a teenage girl from Arizona to Los Angeles to work as a prostitute, the U.S. Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.
Jahque Williams, 21, of Los Angeles, was sentenced last week in federal court in Phoenix. He had previously pleaded guilty to a federal charge of sex trafficking of a minor.
On July 23, 2020, the Human Trafficking Unit of the Los Angeles Police Department found the then-17-year-old girl, who appeared to have been physically assaulted, at a Los Angeles hospital.
The victim indicated that she first met Williams four days earlier through her social media account and he invited her to a party in Phoenix, prosecutors said. At the party, she realized it was a “recruiting party” for commercial sex workers, she told investigators.
Williams then brought the teenager and another adult female to Los Angeles, where he told the girl she would work for him, telling her how much money she would bring back each night, according to federal prosecutors.
On the trip to Los Angeles, Williams prevented the minor from leaving the car by activating the child lock on his vehicle, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona.
