The Florida State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle announced the arrest and extradition of a man in Silver Spring, Maryland, on human trafficking charges Thursday.
In conjunction with the Miami-Dade Human Trafficking Task Force, U.S. Marshals, Montgomery County police and Howard County police, Monriko Mequel Clements, 31, who allegedly fled to Maryland after trafficking a 23-year-old woman, was arrested.
The Maryland resident was charged with two counts — for participating in and gaining income from human trafficking — after officials said a self-identified 23-year-old girlfriend dived out of the moving car onto the Dolphin East-West Expressway.
“Her boyfriend was hitting her while driving their rental vehicle,” Fernandez Rundle said during a press conference announcing the extradition.
She said Clements brought the person to Florida explicitly for prostitution and human trafficking after meeting on the dating app Tinder. She warned of the dangers of victim recruitment on the internet, where a majority of sex trafficking cases stem from as of late.
Clements, also known by his rapper stage name King Swuice, also was accused of tattooing his name onto the victim, a practice that Fernandez Rundle said was common among traffickers.
“This is a common practice, unfortunately, in all kinds of cases,” she said, adding that “it is taken by the alleged trafficker to show that the victim is a possession owned by that trafficker.”
Clements is also accused of offering addictive substances like cocaine and MDMA to make the victim pliable and dependent on him.
He allegedly organized the prostitution of the woman from beginning to end, offering prices for sex, screening clients and more, keeping all of the roughly $20,000 that the victim believes she made. Prosecutors said she was worried about providing for herself and her kids before he began advertising her on Escort Babylon, a digital escorting service.
The state also alleged that Clements published pictures of the victim nude and in lingerie on the site, eventually using a prepaid phone to set up sexual encounters.
She said he was arrested in Fulton, Maryland, and then extradited him to south Florida.
Authorities said that the woman, a mother of two, is recovering from the incident.
