Ogden couple pleads guilty to trafficking women in prostitution operation

Ogden couple pleads guilty to trafficking women in prostitution operation

(Weber County Jail)


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OGDEN — An Ogden couple accused of alternately providing women with drugs or beating and intimidating them to keep them working in the commercial sex operation they ran out of their home pleaded guilty Monday.

Lynnsie Reddish, 20, and Terrance Chavez Jones, 31, each pleaded guilty to two counts of human trafficking, a second-degree felony carrying a potential prison sentence of at least one and up to 15 years in prison.

The four counts are connected to three different women, plea documents filed Monday indicate.

The Utah Attorney General's Office originally charged the couple in 2nd District Court in April with 19 felonies apiece, including aggravated kidnapping, engaging in a pattern of unlawful activity, human trafficking, aggravated exploitation of a prostitute, money laundering and aggravated assault.

The additional charges were dropped in exchange for the couple's guilty pleas.

Reddish and Jones admitted providing heroin to one woman, who was addicted, so long as she kept working for them and giving them the money she made, according to court documents. When the couple thought the woman was going to leave their operation, they both beat her and Reddish cut off her hair with scissors, court documents state.

Reddish and Jones agreed to pay $350 in restitution to help pay for the woman's medical bills, according to the agreement.

Reddish also admitted to recruiting a woman into the operation knowing she had a mental disability, then using that disability and the woman's drug addiction to keep her meeting clients whom Reddish arranged meetings with through online advertisements.

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"I threatened (the woman) with harm to herself or her family if she stopped working for me. I was also physically violent with (the woman), striking her on occasion," Reddish wrote in plea documents.

Jones admitted to providing drugs to a third woman in the operation, according to court documents, and when the woman threatened to leave, "I chased her down and beat her up in the street outside of the house," Jones said in plea documents.

The prostitution operation ran from as early as December 2015 until Jan. 18, 2017, when the first woman was able to escape, the charges state.

Sentencing is scheduled for Jan. 22.

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