Gwinnett police arrested a man this week who is accused of sex trafficking a teenage girl by advertising her on Internet websites.
Quantavious Lee Jackson, 22, was arrested outside a Norcross motel Monday. Police had been investigating him since November when they tracked a runaway teenager to a Jamerson Inn in Duluth after she had been reported missing from a state group home in Bibb County.
The girl told police she was 17, but the investigation revealed that she had been advertised on Backpage.com when she was only 15 when DeKalb police were searching for her during another runaway incident in May 2014.
The girl, who is from Clayton County, lied to police in November, giving a false name, but eventually admitted to being a runaway from the Macon group home, according to a police report.
The girl told police that Jackson and a “friend” of the girl picked her up in Macon in October and took her to Atlanta, where Jackson forced her into prostitution and beat her if she didn’t earn enough money. The girl told police that Jackson had a stable of young girls — ages 15 to 17 from around the South — working as prostitutes in metro Atlanta motels, according to police reports.
“In addition to keeping the money, Jackson also withheld food from the girls; he wanted to keep them thin,” the police report said. “When asked why she chose not to leave later, when Jackson was not around to stop her, (the girl) said that she was scared. She was scared of being alone in a strange city and she was also scared of what Jackson might do.”
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