Many stories have both a villain and a victim.
In this tale, Keosha Renee Jones is both.
Before she was prosecuted as a child sex trafficker, Jones was trafficked in the sex trade.
Forced into prostitution as a child through beatings and drugs, Jones would several years later help her trafficker sexually enslave two 14-year-old runaways.
“I let her know that I was hurt, but she didn’t care,” one of the girls wrote about Jones in a letter to a judge. “She continued to make me do awful things with awful people.”
Jones, 23, said she thinks every day about her role in what happened to those girls. She’s profoundly sorry, she said, “because I’ve been in their shoes.”
According to the FBI, it’s not unusual for a sex trafficking victim to rise through the hierarchy of an organization to become what’s known as a “bottom girl,” the prostitute who has known the trafficker longest and has earned his trust. Typically, bottom girls collect money from other girls, discipline them, recruit them and handle the daily operations of the organization.
Jones’ story began at 15, when she met a man more than four years her senior.
Charismatic, handsome and strong, Derrick Hayes drew Jones into his orbit. Her mother’s longtime boyfriend, a father figure to Jones, had just left the family. Hayes filled part of the void, she said.
Jones’ lawyer, Kevin Beck, says she was vulnerable to abuse and manipulation, in part because she suffers from an intellectual disability.
Jones would be with Hayes for more than six years.
Within a couple of weeks of meeting Hayes, Jones says, the abuse began. It started when she didn’t want to have sex because she was a virgin and wasn’t ready. He told her she was beautiful and he loved her. When that didn’t work, he beat and threatened her until she complied.
Before long, the former middle school cheerleader who dreamed of becoming a pediatrician was drawn into a world of violence, drugs and prostitution.
Hayes was the pimp for a St. Petersburg street gang called 8Hype.
One day, he sent Jones into a bar frequented by white men who liked prostitutes. When the pretty, petite African-American girl walked in, they knew why she was there.
She took one of the men to a park, where they had sex. The man gave Jones $150 or $200. She gave all the money to Hayes. “I had no choice,” she says.
She dropped out of school and began regularly selling her body to men for money she’d turn over to Hayes. She became addicted to Ecstasy, marijuana and alcohol. She lied to her mother to hide what she was doing.
The beatings, she said, were frequent. Hayes would choke her until she passed out. She landed in the hospital emergency room several times. One time, she was hospitalized for a week because she had a sexually transmitted disease.
Once, her brother tried to intervene when Hayes was beating her. Hayes took out a gun and fired it toward her brother, narrowly missing him.
Jones says when she tried to get away and hide, Hayes would find her, beat her and threaten her and her family.
But at the same time, she told Hayes she loved him. He was her boyfriend, her partner and her controller.
There were other girls, she said. But Hayes told her they were just there for sex. She was special, he said.
“He ruined my life,” she says.
Hayes eventually went to prison on a weapons charge, and she continued to work as a prostitute. When he got out, their twisted relationship resumed.
Then in late 2012, when Jones was about 21, Hayes called her to meet the two runaways. Jones says they told her they were 17 and didn’t have a place to go.
“I want to put them up in the game,” Hayes told Jones, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Swanson. Jones, he said, “knew exactly what that meant.”
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Jones brought the two teens to the Bayway Inn in St. Petersburg where she was living and working as a prostitute. She had already set up a “date” with a customer and had the two girls join in. Each was paid $100. The FBI says Jones collected the money.
Jones said she took the girls to a mall and bought them new clothes. She set them up in the hotel.
Jones also worked with others in the organization to put advertisements for the girls in an online publication frequented by prostitutes: “Two ebony princesses that like to live, laugh, love and have fun any way u want. ... Only serious gentlemen need apply.”
Over the ensuing days, Jones would receive phone calls from customers and would have one or both of the girls meet him at a nearby gas station and then come back to the hotel to have sex, according to an FBI affidavit. They would give all the money to Jones.
“I never saw a dollar,” one of the girls wrote later. “The most we would get is a bar of soap to make sure we were clean for the next job.”
In January 2013, the girl said, Jones “hired a man that hurt me real bad. I could not walk or anything.”
The girl said she called her mother, who came and took her to the hospital. She had severe vaginal injuries and had contracted herpes.
Jones said when she came upon a flier about the girls having run away from home, she realized their age. She said she called police and told them where to find the girls. She says she eventually put them in a cab and sent them home.
Six months later, the FBI arrested Jones.
Now, she says the agents saved her. “I’m thankful that I was taken from that life,” she said Friday during her sentencing hearing.
Jones pleaded guilty to conspiring to engage in sex trafficking of children. While her case made its way through the courts, Jones spent six months behind bars in the Pinellas County Jail.
Then U.S. District Judge Richard Lazzara allowed her to be released to the custody of her mother and stepfather and placed on electronic monitoring. “She, in a very real sense, is a victim herself,” the judge said during a hearing in January 2014. “It’s unquestioned that for five years or thereabouts, she was terrorized” by Hayes.
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In releasing Jones, Lazzara challenged her not to disappoint him or her family or Beck, her court-appointed lawyer.
Jones cooperated against Hayes, helping authorities to indict him. He pleaded guilty the week before his scheduled trial. Last month, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
Jones once professed to love Hayes. Now, she said, she hates him.
“The Lord has the last say,” Jones said when asked about Hayes’ prison term. “It’s his call. … I don’t wish jail on anybody, but a person like him deserves to sit behind bars for a very, very long time to think about not only what he’s done, but other girls he’s victimized. So that 30 years, I was OK with that.”
Beck said Jones’ cooperation was a dangerous proposition, given his involvement with a violent street gang.
Jones also gave authorities in Pinellas County information about the prostitution customer she’d shared with the girls.
Jones also used her time out of jail to straighten out her life. She complied with all the conditions of her release, stayed clean and sober, got a job and attended counseling. She made strides toward attaining a GED.
As a registered sex offender, she knows she won’t be allowed to work around children and will never be a pediatrician. Now, she hopes to become a cosmetologist one day, maybe owning her own business.
“Ms. Jones was raped and brutalized,” Beck told U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew on Friday. “Despite all of the difficulties and shortcomings, she has soared. She has taken up this challenge and absolutely run with it.”
“My life is so much better,” Jones told The Tampa Tribune. “I’m sober. I’m clear-headed. I’m happy. I’m not being abused. I have a good boyfriend. … I’m surrounded by a lot of positive people.”
She says she would like to help girls who are at risk of falling into the life she used to have.
“I would basically tell them these guys are going to tell you what you want to hear; they’re going to bribe you with money,” she said. But they should ask themselves, “Why would an older guy want a younger girl?”
“Trouble,” she said, “is easy to get in, but hard to get out of.”
If she knew then what she knows now, she said, she would have told her mother what was happening. “She would have stopped it,” she says.
Back then, she said, she would cry about her life. “But when I started crying, I would just drink alcohol to take the pain away or do drugs or smoke marijuana to take the pain away,” she says. “Now I realize that makes it worse.”
Now, she prays or talks to her counselor.
Still, she struggled with nightmares, has trouble with her emotions and has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Bucklew said she struggled about finding the right thing to do with Jones.
“What you did was horrendous,” the judge said. “I consider you a victim as well.”
“I’m going to take a chance on you,” she said.
Bucklew sentenced Jones to the six months she’s already served, plus five years of supervised release. Among the conditions are requirements that she maintain full-time employment, earn her GED, undergo random drug tests and perform 100 hours of community service work.
If she violates any conditions, Bucklew said, Jones will be sentenced to a long prison term.
“Don’t disappoint us,” the judge warned.
After the hearing, Jones thanked Swanson, the prosecutor.
Then she walked over to FBI agent William Jones and gave the man who had arrested her a big hug.
“You’re the lifesaver,” she said. “You’re a hero.”
esilvestrini@tampatrib.com
813-259-7837
Twitter: @ElaineTBO