Man charged with sex trafficking. Victim jumped from car in Miami to avoid beating
Six weeks after a woman was so desperate to escape from a former boyfriend that she jumped out of his moving rental car on a major South Florida highway, the man was found in another state and extradited to South Florida where he is expected to stand trial.
Investigators from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, along with U.S. Marshals and local Maryland law enforcement, found Monriko Mequel Clements, 31, last week in the tiny town of Fulton in the state’s northwest corner. They say he beat his former girlfriend, plied her with drugs and forced her into prostitution.
Clements was charged this week with a single count of human trafficking and another of profiting from prostitution. He remained jailed Thursday at the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center. His bond has been set at $45,000. He’s also wanted in California on a grand theft auto charge.
“She jumped out of a moving car, risking injury and death because she could not think of a better way of avoiding the beatings,” State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle said Thursday during an afternoon press conference.
Prosecutors say they first became aware of Clements on Nov. 14, when the woman jumped out of a car he had rented on busy State Road 836. Florida Highway Patrol troopers found her and notified the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state attorney’s Human Trafficking Task Force.
The woman — who is 23 and has two children has only been identified as “M.C.” — said Clements was beating her with a cellphone cord when she jumped out of the sports utility vehicle.
According to Clements’ arrest warrant, the woman said she met Clements through the dating app Tinder last May in Maryland and was soon invited to a strip club in Baltimore where he performed musically under the name “King Swuice.” Clements Facebook page includes a number of adult-oriented videos, several of which show him holding wads of cash while surrounded by dancing girls in G-strings.
Investigators said that three weeks into their relationship, M.C. lost her job at Chipotle and told Clements she was worried about providing for her children. He suggested prostitution, saying she could make as much as $120 for a 15-minute encounter. Clements then posted pictures of M.C. naked and in lingerie on escort sites that said she charged up to $300 an hour. M.C. even tattooed “KSwuice” above her left breast, telling investigators it shows she belongs to him.
The tattoo is reminiscent of a 2013 case in which an alleged pimp named Roman Thomas III was accused of forcing a 13-year-old prostitute into having his street name, “Suave,” tattooed onto her eyelids. It was one of the first major cases undertaken by the state’s then-new human trafficking task force.
M.C. estimated she earned as much as $20,000 between May and November, but that Clements kept all the money and only fed, housed and provided her with drugs.
When the weather got cold in the northeast, Clements and M.C. came down to South Florida. They were here for about a week before she took her leap of faith on the dangerous highway. Though prosecutors say she met most of her South Florida clients on Miami Beach and in Fort Lauderdale, the duo took up temporary residence in Florida City.
It was there, investigators said, that Clements was almost captured several hours before M.C. jumped from his rented silver, four-door Mitsubishi SUV. M.C. told them she managed to call her mother at about 6 that morning and tell her that she was in danger and that Clements was beating her. Her mother, his arrest warrant claims, then contacted Florida City Police.
But when police arrived, the warrant says, M.C. backtracked, saying the two were fighting and that she was frightened, but that there had not been any type of physical altercation. Florida City Police left. As they headed to Miami Beach, M.C. said Clements threatened to kill her and beat her before she jumped out. Clements drove to the airport, returned the vehicle and left town, investigators said.
Almost half of women forced into prostitution are recruited online. Human trafficking is an estimated $150 billion industry worldwide. The U.S. Department of Justice says Florida is the third most popular state for human trafficking and that Miami-Dade leads the way in Florida.
“To the pimps,” Fernandez Rundle said, “the victims are not human beings. They’re simply a commodity.”
This story was originally published December 29, 2022 at 5:55 PM.
