MARTINEZ — An Antioch man arrested a month after his 18th birthday on suspicion of human trafficking was sentenced to eight years in prison last Friday as part of a plea deal with county prosecutors.
Deangelo Prince-Hardin, 19, will be eligible for release after serving four years with good behavior, and already has more than two years credit for time served, prosecutors said. He was sentenced Jan. 11 after pleading no contest to human trafficking and pimping or soliciting a minor less than 16 years old.
There were two victims named in the criminal complaint against Prince-Hardin: a girl who was 14 when she identified Hardin as her pimp after Richmond police detained her on suspicion of prostitution in late 2017, and an 18-year-old who said she was Prince-Hardin’s former girlfriend and that he became physically and mentally abusive after convincing her to prostitute for him.
The 18-year-old, known only as Jane Doe 1 in court records, said that as early as June 2017 she began walking “tracks” — areas that are known prostitution hot spots — in Oakland, San Francisco and Richmond, and giving Prince-Hardin the money she earned. She said after they dated for three months, he convinced her to engage in sex trafficking.
“I thought that I loved him and that he loved me and cared for me,” the young woman testified in Prince-Hardin’s preliminary hearing last May. “I thought that by doing that, it would be a way to keep him.”
Months later, they moved in together and “that’s when he started to be more controlling,” Doe 1 testified. She said the physical abuse went “anywhere from burning me with cigarettes to hitting me.”
“It was rare if there was a day where I didn’t get some type of punch in the face or spit in my face or anything like that,” she said on the stand.
When she tried to escape, buying a train ticket to the house of her mother — who has recently moved several counties away — Prince-Hardin found her packing her bags and hit her with a metal pole, she testified. He later allegedly told her she was “fired.”
By contrast to Doe 1, the 14-year-old girl refused to tell her story, trying in vain to “plead the Fifth” even after prosecutors and a judge informed her she had been subpoenaed and had to testify. She denied being scared of Prince-Hardin or of being branded a “snitch,” and would only briefly confirm she was arrested while “getting money” in Richmond.
Other than that, aside from saying her favorite color was pink and least favorite subject was math, the girl repeatedly refused to talk.
“Well, if you don’t answer, I’m going to have to think of something such as have you do math problems for days on end. How does that sound?” Judge John Allen said the girl. She didn’t respond.
“I have a right not to talk,” she said at one point.
“Actually, you don’t,” the judge responded. Eventually, the questions stopped.
But a Richmond police detective later testified that the girl had identified Prince-Hardin as her pimp after she was stopped in Richmond. The girl was released to Children Family Services but ran away and returned to Prince-Hardin, the detective testified.