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Indiana man sentenced for luring girl, 14, into sex trafficking over Facebook

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A Fort Wayne, Indiana man has been convicted on human trafficking charges after police say he tried luring a 14-year-old into prostitution online.
Police were driving down Winter Street in Fort Wayne, Ind. in March 2016 when they spotted an illegally parked car on the side of the road.
The officers pulled over to investigate, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reports, and looked into the gray Chrysler sedan.
Inside, police found Patrick J. Davis, 30, and a woman at the wheel in the front seat. In the back, police saw a 14-year-old girl sleeping, her face caked with a “good deal” of makeup, according to court documents. The teen girl appeared “confused with her surroundings,” WANE reports.
Though the woman in the car told police the girl was her young cousin, authorities took the girl to a juvenile center and quickly uncovered the truth: The girl was a runaway, and she’d met Davis on Facebook — the platform he’d used to try luring her into prostitution, WANE reports.
Davis told the girl that he would call her “Alexis,” court records said, because he hoped that by prostituting her out he’d make enough money to buy a Lexus, the Journal Gazette reports.
Davis was sentenced to more than six years behind bars and two years of supervised release after being convicted on one count of sex trafficking of children, U. S. Attorney for the Northern District of Indiana Thomas L. Kirsch II announced in a news release Friday.
More than 7,600 cases of human trafficking were reported in the U. S. last year, according to National Human Trafficking Hotline data. Of those victims, about 5,600 were trafficked for sex — and about one in three trafficking victims was a minor.
Indiana is no exception: A report released by the state’s attorney general found that, in 2016 alone, 178 Indiana youth had been trafficking victims. The youngest victim was 7.
Davis had used Facebook to convince the girl that she should run away from home so they could make money through prostitution, according to the U. S. attorney. He even helped her compose a note she left for her parents saying goodbye, WOWO reports.
Then, on March 28, she ran away with him, according to WOWO — meeting Davis in the back alley, right behind her house.
The girl had told Davis about her age, according to court documents reviewed by WANE.
“You know I am not 15 yet,” she told Davis, court documents said. Davis said that “no one had to know,” according to court documents reviewed by WANE.
As soon as Davis picked her up at her home, he took her phone and deactivated her Facebook “to make it harder to track (her) movements,” court documents WANE reviewed said.
Then, Davis took her to his mother’s house to spend the night before they planned to take off for Ohio, where Davis said he was going to put the 14-year-old through “bootcamp” so she would understand the rules of prostitution, WANE reports. Davis had planned to use the website backpage.com to pimp the girl out, court documents said.
The girl also told police that Davis raped her, the Journal Gazette reports.
At some point, Davis had also taken the 14-year-old to a house where he paraded her before a group of men, the Journal Gazette reports — at which point a woman (who had herself been convicted of promoting prostitution in the past) questioned the girl’s age, according to court documents.
“In this game she is 21,” Davis told the woman, according to court documents the Journal Gazette reviewed.

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