Two alleged sex-trafficking rings — including one whose victims were as young as 13 — have been busted in New Jersey, leading to the indictment of seven people, prosecutors said Tuesday.
Khailah Meekins, 21, and accomplice Donte Barkley, 28, both of Newark, were indicted for allegedly trafficking two 15-year-old girls and a 13-year-old girl in Essex County.
Ringleader Meekins is accused of beating her victims with an electrical cord and using other acts of violence to keep them subjugated, while “subjecting them to sexual assaults by strangers,” according to Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin.
Via smartphone apps, Barclay arranged for those strangers to meets the girls after advertising them online using nude photos. The girls were then taken to short-term rentals and hotel rooms, where men paid Meekins to assault them, Platkin said.
Meekins and Barkley are both charged with first-degree human trafficking, while Meekins is also charged with second-degree aggravated assault.
A third suspect, Richard Johnson, 24, had already been indicted in August on third-degree aggravated assault charges for allegedly paying for sex with one of the minors.
The operators of a second sex-trafficking ring in southern New Jersey’s Cumberland County allegedly lured multiple women “on a weekly basis” from Paterson, N.J., and Queens, N.Y., via pretext that they’d be working as “dancers.” Instead they were taken to a Bridgeton brothel, forbidden to leave and “forced to perform commercial sex” with hundreds of men each week, according to Platkin.
Indicted in that ring were Usiel Luna, 42, and alleged co-conspirators Jose Perez-Lopez, 40; Rosendo Vazquez-Hernandez, 35; and Yerson Puentes-Marquez, 28, all from Bridgeton. A search of the brothel and Luna’s home also yielded $50,000 cash, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana, Platkin’s office said.
“These alleged crimes are a stark reminder as to why we must be steadfast in our goal to end human trafficking in all of its forms,” Platkin said, according to the Bergen Record. “We are — and as long as I’m the attorney general of this state, will remain — committed to pursuing charges against anyone who engages in human trafficking.”