North Texas U.S. attorney leads the way by going after the demand side of sex trafficking
- Get link
- Other Apps
North Texas U.S. attorney leads the way by going after the demand side of sex trafficking
Erin Nealy Cox partners with local law enforcement to stop this scourge.
By Dallas Morning News Editorial
2:00 AM on Sep 17, 2020
One year ago, any parent’s greatest nightmare became a reality for one Fort Worth family. After dropping off their 13-year-old daughter at middle school on Sept. 25, 2019, they received a call from the school saying she never arrived in class that day. A missing persons report was filed.
Six weeks later, detectives with the Fort Worth Police Department’s Human Trafficking/Missing Persons Unit identified the child in an ad selling her for sex on CityXGuide.com, a classified advertising site launched shortly after the U.S. Justice Department shut down the notorious Backpage.com, the world’s largest website for buying and selling sex, in April 2018.
On Nov. 4-5, 2019, the Fort Worth detectives answered the ad through text messages and, along with federal agents, conducted a successful sting operation resulting in the rescue of the 13-year-old child; the arrest of her alleged trafficker, 34-year-old Curtis Vance Mathis; the shutdown of CityXGuide; and the arrest of its owner, 46-year-old Wilhan Martono, who faces up to 25 years in a federal prison if convicted of charges that include “reckless disregard of sex trafficking,” “facilitating prostitution” and money laundering.
Thanks to the fine work of the Fort Worth detectives and feds, the girl and her family’s nightmare had ended — and the long road to healing and recovery had begun. Yet, until now, none of the “johns” who paid for sex with the 13-year-old girl — clearly a child who, according to police affidavits, was rescued from a West Irving hotel room wearing only a “hoodie,” visibly terrified, and held against her will — had been charged with a crime or arrested.
That all changed when Erin Nealy Cox, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, announced on Sept. 16 that Kention Obryan Johnson, 35, and Sergio Trinidad Carvajal, 30, were arrested Sept. 9 in connection with the case and charged with “conspiracy to commit sex trafficking and sex trafficking of children.” If convicted, both men — along with the child’s alleged trafficker, Mathis — face up to life in prison.
“Traffickers sell children for sex because their clients will pay for it. It’s that simple,” Nealy Cox said at a news conference. “By attacking both the supply and the demand, we think we will be able to truly make a difference in fighting this dehumanizing, horrific crime.”
We couldn’t agree more. Indeed, in our ongoing series of editorials on the scourge of sex trafficking, we’ve long argued that instead of the traditional approach to prostitution that often punishes those being trafficked, law enforcement should be targeting the traffickers and the buyers with greater zeal.
Thanks in part to the Abolish Human Trafficking Act of 2017, which makes clear that a buyer of a commercial sex act from a trafficking victim is just as culpable as the trafficker, the “demand side” of this criminal activity is finally receiving the attention it deserves.
Last October, Assistant Attorney General Beth Williams announced the launch of a federal sex trafficking Demand Reduction Initiative. “Targeting demand,” she explained, together with efforts to target traffickers, “provides the most comprehensive strategy to fight this dehumanizing and horrific crime.”
It’s one thing to say you’re “targeting demand,” it’s quite another to do the dogged police work and carry out the often-exhaustive investigations that can lead to a solid federal case. An exclusive interview with Nealy Cox, along with the unsealing of court documents for the case, revealed just how painstaking such investigations are, and why it can take months to compile all the evidence and finally make an arrest.
“I think this case is a great example of how we’re really going after the entire ecosystem,” said Nealy Cox. “If you’re just attacking one side of the equation — that is, the supply-side of the equation — you’re never really going to make as much advancement as you want to.” Across the country, she explained, the Justice Department is “taking more trafficking cases than ever before.”
In the Northern District of Texas, she continued, “we’ve really focused our efforts here, through Homeland Security Investigations and our Human Trafficking Task Force, on the types of cases where it made sense for federal involvement, and then working with our state and local partners to support their charges as well.”
“Federal cases are different from state,” she said. “We work them up differently.” In this case, she said, “a 13-year-old was rescued, and then we built the case off of that rescue.” Her office, she said, is focusing on “how we as feds can provide the right kind of cases where federal penalties are going to serve as a significant deterrent. Those are the kind of cases that we’re looking to partner with our law enforcement partners on, and really make a difference there.”
Sex-trafficking cases, she said, are often investigated by a number of agencies, including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the North Texas Trafficking Task Force, which includes local police and their task forces.
“In this particular case,” Nealy Cox said, “on Sept. 25, the Fort Worth Police Department received a report that the 13-year-old was missing.” But it was “not until Nov. 4 that Fort Worth police, working with Homeland Security, were able to identify her on the CityXGuide website.”
“When we recovered the victim,” Nealy Cox continued, “there was nobody with her.” The girl’s trafficker had fled. “And so,” she explained, “our primary motivation was to get her to safety, and to get her the help and support that she needed. It was only after that that we were then able to work with her to understand what had happened to her, to then go to the hotel, get the video surveillance, and work the case back up.”
That video surveillance, text messages and DNA evidence taken from the hotel room where the child was abused served as the foundation for a case against the johns arrested last week. “This is a federal case,” said Nealy Cox. “We’re not going to make it in haste. … It takes time to work the case, and we’re going to make a really solid case before we go to the jury.”
“In the first instance,” Nealy Cox continued, “we took out the person who was actually trafficking the victim. In the second instance, we did a much longer investigation to see if we could identify and take out the website so we could have the most significant impact on sex trafficking in general. And in the third case, as we collected our evidence, some of which was calls and DNA evidence, we made a case on the johns.”
There’s no denying, said Nealy Cox, that this particular case, like so many involving trafficked minors, is “heartbreaking.” But her holistic approach — fighting both the supply and demand side of sex trafficking across many agencies with all their resources and investigative tenacity — is precisely what’s needed to bring down the sex trafficking industry in Texas and across the country.
If the pimps and johns are now finding that their luck is running out as justice comes rushing into the dark corners in which they reside, it’s because North Texas is lucky to have a U.S. attorney with the steel of Erin Nealy Cox.
- Get link
- Other Apps
Comments
Post a Comment