A 46-year-old Long Beach woman pleaded guilty Wednesday to helping her son prostitute a local runaway girl.
The investigation was opened by Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) detectives in 2012 when a 15-year-old girl’s father reported her missing.
Evidence found indicated that Sharilyn Kae Anderson, along with her now-23-year-old son Joshua Jerome Davis, had prostituted the girl at several Southern California hotels and transported her across state lines to Nevada to engage in commercial sex in Las Vegas Casinos, authorities said.
Court documents show that Davis first began communicating with the girl on Facebook in 2010, when she was 14, leading to an initial in-person meeting a year later.
Months later, the girl created an account on a prostitution website, subsequently telling investigators she paid David about 30 percent of the proceeds she earned from commercial sex.
At first, the girl claimed Davis believed she was 19, but when she was confronted by investigators with a text from Davis proving he knew she was not yet 18, she recanted and said Davis believed she was 17, prosecutors said.
“Unfortunately, it’s all too common for minors involved in prostitution who are under duress to attempt to shield their pimps from law enforcement by withholding or minimizing information regarding the pimp’s knowledge and control over the minor’s activities,” Claude Arnold, special agent in charge for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles, said.
Anderson transported the girl and an additional adult victim to hostels to engage in prostitution when her son was unavailable, according to court documents. She also made threats and assaulted the woman to intimidate her into continuing to make money for her son by prostituting.
Davis was initially arrested in April 2013 and was booked into the Long Beach City Jail on state pandering and human trafficking violations.
He told investigators that he got the hotel room for the girl in Las Vegas “out of the goodness of his heart,” according to a case affidavit.
When he posted bail in the state case, David returned to the Las Vegas area, where he reunited with the girl and resumed his commercial sex activities.
When Davis was arrested again in North Las Vegas in August 2013, investigators found and rescued the now 19-year-old victim, who was with Anderson.
Anderson, who also pleaded guilty to prostituting a woman through the use of fraud, force and coercion, is scheduled to be sentenced May 18 and faces a possible penalty of life in federal prison.
Her guilty plea comes about a week after Davis pleaded guilty to the sex trafficking conspiracy, along with two federal counts of sex trafficking of a minor and an adult by force and threats of force or coercion. He is scheduled to be sentenced May 4.
City News Services contributed to this report.