Jury convicts Sacramento pimp of prostituting underage females

SACRAMENTO — A Sacramento man was convicted Tuesday on numerous prostitution charges related to his pimping of underage females over a four-year period.

After a five-day trial before U.S. District Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr., a jury returned guilty verdicts against Deandre Lornell Brown, 25, of Sacramento, on five counts of conspiracy, sex trafficking of children and using force, fraud or coercion, and participating in a venture that engaged in sex trafficking of children.

According to testimony presented at trial, Brown met and recruited two underage girls to work for him as prostitutes in and around the Sacramento area. Brown recruited the first minor in 2005, and she continued to work for him until his arrest in September 2009.

Brown used force, threats of force, and coercion to force Victim #1 to prostitute for him. These acts included rape, pistol-whipping, and putting a pistol into Victim #1’s mouth and fingering the trigger. Brown also regularly assaulted Victim #1, slapping, punching and kicking her.

In one incident described during the trial, Brown inflicted wounds on Victim #1 that were so severe, including pouring bleach into open wounds on Victim #1’s body, that emergency medical treatment was required. In another incident, Brown described for Victim #1 how he would kill her and her family if she ever tried to leave him. According to Victim #1, the only person that Brown would spare during his murderous rampage was Victim #1’s infant daughter, whom Brown would leave on the doorstep of a stranger.

Brown recruited a second minor on Sept. 2, 2009, as she was walking near Arden Fair Mall. Victim #2 worked for Brown until Sept. 13, 2009, when she ran away following a beating that Brown inflicted in an apartment used by Brown off Stockton Boulevard.

During the time that she was with him, Victim #2 was anally raped, forced to engage in sexual acts with other prostitutes that worked for Brown, and assaulted.

Brown forced victims #1 and #2, along with a third prostitute, his co-defendant in the case, Brittney Beacham, to work for him primarily in the Stockton Boulevard area of South Sacramento. Brown drove the girls to the “Stockton blade,” posted online advertisements on prostitution websites advertising the girls’ services, monitored and supervised their activities, and collected the money that they earned from prostitution. Brown also violently enforced his pimping rules in order to maintain control of the girls. Those rules included forcing the girls to refer to him as “Poppa,” requiring them to work nearly every day of the year, and not permitting them to speak with any African-American males.

For her role in prostituting Victim #2, Beacham pled guilty to misprision of a felony on April 19.

Judge Damrell said that the jurors had been exposed to a “cesspool” of activities not seen by most residents of the Eastern District of California that turned 15- and 16-year-old girls into 40-year-old women in a matter of weeks, leaving scars that would last a lifetime. This case is the product of an extensive joint investigation by the Sacramento Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working together as part of the FBI’s Innocence Lost Task Force. Assistant United States Attorneys Kyle Reardon and Michael Beckwith are prosecuting the case.

Brown’s sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 29. He faces a sentence of no less than 15 years, and up to life in prison, a lifetime period of supervised release, and a $250,000 fine. The actual sentence, however, will be determined at the discretion of the court after consideration of any applicable statutory factors and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, which take into account a number of variables.