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What happened
Four individuals ran a sex trafficking business out of their home property in Omaha, Nebraska. Merrideth Crane-Horton was described in court records as the "mastermind." Her husband, Edwin Horton, handled the money, while Ramon Heredia, Horton's nephew, provided the muscle. Katherine Heredia worked as a prostitute. The trafficked girls involved were under the age of eighteen, one girl was only thirteen years of age. Two girls, the thirteen year old and a fifteen year old, managed to escape. Girls harbored at this Omaha residence were beaten and threatened to perform sexual acts for pay with their earnings going directly to their traffickers. One woman, now 20, told authorities that Crane-Horton and Ramon Heredia beat her to coerce her into prostitution and to keep her from talking to police. The woman said Crane-Horton would lock her inside a room without heat or lights to compel her to perform sex acts. Katherine Heredia was also working as a co-conspirator as well as a prostitute. She claims to have been subject to violent beatings to “keep [the other girls] in line”. A local expert on human trafficking said it's not uncommon for a victim like Katherine Heredia to become a co-conspirator. "It is very similar to a domestic violence situation," said a member of the Omaha Salvation Army's social services division. "It is somewhat like Stockholm syndrome. After a period of brainwashing and breaking,' you co-opt with your abuser ... and bring into the fold younger people. It is a distorted idea of love."
Response and intervention
Merrideth Crane-Horton, 33, and her husband, Edwin “Nate” Horton, 35, recently were sentenced to 17½ and 14½ years, respectively, for trafficking in women. Katherine Heredia, 23, who was both a prostitute and a conspirator in the ring, was sentenced to three years in prison. Heredia’s husband, Ramon D. Heredia, 21, has been sentenced to 132 months of imprisonment, five years of supervised release following his imprisonment, and a $100.00 special assessment for the Crime Victim Fund. Council Bluffs police and FBI agents learned of the operation on January 21st, 2010, when they responded to an ad on Craigslist as part of a prostitution sting. A then-18-year-old La Vista woman met an undercover police officer in a Council Bluffs apartment. While she negotiated a $160 sex act inside the apartment, Crane-Horton and Ramon Heredia waited outside in a car - with the young prostitute's 9-week-old daughter. When authorities arrested Crane-Horton and Ramon Heredia, they found a GPS device in the vehicle. The device was used to locate the ring's "johns," or clients, according to court documents. The head of the local Innocence Lost task force said in court testimony that the sex ring existed because of Crane-Horton. There is no reported aftercare or support for the girls harbored in this particular sex trafficking ring. The Omaha task force in this area has helped take six young women off the streets. Last month, they passed along a cell phone number from an ad that enabled St. Louis authorities to track down an Omaha runaway thought to be working as a prostitute. The girl, who was 16 when she ran away, now is in a treatment facility for children, according to an official with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This case remains under investigation. http://www.omaha.com/article/20101026/NEWS97/710269921/0 http://www.nptelegraph.com/articles/2011/02/06/news/state/60008020.txt http://www.justice.gov/usao/ias/press_releases/2011/Ramon%20Heredia%20-%20Sentencing%20-%20Media%20Release%20-%204-12-11.pdf