(NEW ORLEANS) – Dajanae Drake, a 29-year-old Missouri City woman, has been sentenced to 24 months imprisonment, three years of supervised release and a mandatory special assessment fee of $100 after pleading guilty to obstruction, attempted obstruction, and interference with the enforcement of the federal criminal sex trafficking statute.
According to court documents, Drake was involved with Houston resident Randi Lewis, who was eventually incarcerated after being charged with sex trafficking of a minor.
Lewis met an unidentified 16-year-old in early 2020. Lewis recruited the minor to engage in commercial sex acts under his direction and she complied. Around June of 2021, Lewis and the unidentified minor met a 13-year-old victim in the Houston area. At Lewis’s direction, the unidentified minor recruited the victim to perform commercial sex acts, which would also be under Lewis’s direction. Lewis arranged for the unidentified minor and the minor victim to travel with him to New Orleans on a Greyhound bus for the purpose of his co-conspirator and the victim to engage in commercial sex acts. Between June 22, 2021, and June 24, 2021, the co-conspirator and the minor victim performed multiple commercial sex acts in the New Orleans area. On June 24, 2021, law enforcement authorities recovered the victim and arrested the unidentified minor and Lewis at a hotel in Terrytown, Louisiana. The minor co-conspirator and Lewis were charged criminally and incarcerated.
Between June 25, 2021, and about Nov. 28, 2021, Drake held numerous telephone conversations with the minor co-conspirator and Lewis, including several conversations during which Drake knowingly encouraged the minor co-conspirator to sign a false affidavit saying that Lewis played no role in recruiting and trafficking the minor victim.
This case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse. Led by the United States Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state, and local resources to locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who sexually exploit children, and to identify and rescue victims.