NC girl, 16, said man tried to prostitute her in Las Vegas. Was it human trafficking?
At 10:30 p.m. a 16-year-old called 911 from a McDonald’s bathroom in Durham.
“I am getting forced to prostitute,” the teen from Charlotte told the operator in the April 8, 2018, phone call. “Me and another girl.”
The phone call led to the arrest of Corey Oliver Smith, now 40, who was sitting outside the restaurant waiting for the women in an orange car that looked like a cab.
The women told police they had met Smith in Charlotte and that he had brought them to the Raleigh-Durham International Airport so he could fly them to Las Vegas to work as prostitutes on the strip.
This week Smith sat in a Durham County courtroom as he faced the rare charge of attempted human trafficking of a minor. Neither of the two women in the bathroom that night were still cooperating in the case, and the lead investigator didn’t testify.
Smith was also charged with first-degree kidnapping.
If found guilty of both crimes, Smith faced from 6 years and 4 months in prison to 27 1/2 years in prison, his attorney said.
Human trafficking is a rare charge
In fiscal year 2017-18, there were 32 human trafficking charges filed in superior courts across the state, with 20 of those involving a minor, according to North Carolina Judicial Branch data.
In comparison, there were 471 first-degree kidnapping charges filed in superior courts across the state.
The case against Smith demonstrates the challenges prosecutors face when they do press charges. In this case that includes the alleged victims disappearing and Smith’s attorney arguing the 31-year-old woman in the case had asked Smith to help her and the 16-year-old get to Las Vegas.
“Corey says, ‘You know what, we’re together, I will drive you there,” defense attorney Daniel Meier said during opening arguments.
It isn’t easy to prosecute a case with a victim who isn’t cooperative and often leaves jurors with questions, wrote Jeff Welty, professor of public law and government at the UNC School of Government, in an email.
“But prosecutors have been proceeding that way more often in recent years, particularly in domestic violence cases where it is common for victims to recant or to decline to cooperate,” Welty wrote.
Charlene Reiss, coordinator of the Durham Crisis Response Center’s sexual assault response team, said she knows of some local human trafficking investigations but none that led to charges.
The Durham County District Attorney’s Office moving forward with this case, regardless of the outcome, sends a message to victims and perpetrators that they are taking these situations seriously and pursuing convictions aggressively, Reiss said.
“I think it is also sending the message that just because there is not enough evidence to convict someone doesn’t mean the system doesn’t believe the victim,” she said.
‘Then she hung up’
Before testimony started, Judge Michael O’Foghludha declared the teen legally unavailable, which allowed the prosecutor to share with jurors her testimony from a previous probable cause hearing that allowed the case to proceed to trial.
Montgomery-Blinn said the teen and her mother cooperated initially but that earlier this year court officials had trouble reaching them.
On Oct. 16, Montgomery-Blinn called the their number and the mother said the teen was afraid, didn’t want to testify again, and they wouldn’t be able to find her.
“Then she hung up,” Montgomery-Blinn said in court.
Montgomery-Blinn and others followed up by leaving phone messages and visiting the family’s last known address, but never located them.
Montgomery-Blinn said in court that Smith had faced similar charges in Maryland and that a detective that worked on the case came to Durham to testify. The detective wasn’t allowed to testify after Meier successfully argued the detective’s testimony would be hearsay since the women who were allegedly trafficked aren’t testifying.
The lead police investigator in the Durham County case, Dominic Mussatti, resigned Oct. 29, and also wasn’t called as a witness. At the request of Meier, the judge reviewed Mussatti’s personnel file, but said he didn’t find anything relevant to this case.
Two questions
Montgomery-Blinn told the jurors they had to answer two questions:
▪ Did Smith attempt to human traffic a minor who can’t consent to sexual acts?
“For attempt, the defendant has to take at least one step to get that to happen,” she said.
And mistaking the minor’s age is not a defense, she said.
▪ Did Smith kidnap, confine, restrain or move her from one place to another through force, fraud or fear?
Montgomery-Blinn argued that Smith tricked the teen into going with him by initially saying they were going to a party and then threatened to kill the women if they called police.
“[The teen] told the police that he was going to kill them. She said it over and over again,” Montgomery-Blinn said.
Smith picked up two women in Charlotte after meeting them on the online dating site Plenty of Fish, the prosecutor said.
The women thought they were going to a party, but ended up in a motel room in Greensboro, where Smith had sex with the 31-year-old, the Montgomery-Blinn said.
“Sure there were moments where (the teen) could have walked out the door and flagged down a car,” the prosecutor said, but she didn’t know the area and she was afraid that she would get in trouble too.
Smith then took the women to Raleigh-Durham International Airport and planned to put them on a plane to Las Vegas to “walk the strip,” Montgomery-Blinn said.
Smith dropped the 16-year-old off at the airport with a ticket, but she wasn’t able to get on the plane.
The 31-year-old stayed with Smith, who was working on getting her a plane ticket, Montgomery-Blinn said.
The 16-year-old tried to tell workers at the airport about her situation, but they didn’t want to get involved, Montgomery-Blinn said.
Smith eventually picked the teen back up, and she asked him to take the women back to Charlotte, but he refused, the prosecutor said.
‘She called him to pick her up’
Meier argued it was the 31-year-old’s idea to go to Las Vegas and implied Smith was just giving them a ride. He also pointed out all the people who didn’t testify.
When judging a person’s credibility, being able to see them and their body language and to ask questions “helps a lot,” Meier said.
The women packed suitcases for the trip and didn’t try to leave when they were left alone numerous times, Meier said. After the teen couldn’t get on the plane to Las Vegas, the teen called Smith to come get her.
“She called him to pick her up,” Meier said. “You can’t call someone to pick you up, and then when they pick you up say ‘Oh my God, I am being kidnapped by this person I called.’ ”
The only reason Smith was charged was because he refused to take the women back to Charlotte after they left the airport, Meier said.
It’s not kidnapping if someone asks you to take them somewhere, and you do, and then they ask you to take them somewhere else, Meier said.
“It’s not kidnapping to refuse someone a ride,” he said. “Especially not if you are not actually restraining them or confining them.”
After nearly two days of deliberating, the jury on Thursday found Smith guilty on both charges. Smith, who is from Los Angeles, California, is scheduled to be sentenced at 11 a.m. Friday, which will give court officials time to review his convictions in that state.
Meier said he plans to appeal.
This story was originally published November 21, 2019 at 5:10 PM.
