The 36-year-old pleaded guilty to sex trafficking of children in June 2021.
DALLAS — A man who trafficked a 13-year-old girl out of an Irving hotel room was sentenced Wednesday to serve more than 11 years in prison.
Curtis Mathis, 36, first pleaded guilty to the charge of sex trafficking children in June 2021 after being indicted in December 2019. U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade sentenced Mathis to serve 135 months in prison.
“Those who exploit minors for the commercial sex industry have no regard for human decency. These predators are responsible for initiating a pattern of mental and physical abuse that is often hard for their victims to overcome,” said Jesse Woods, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Homeland Security Investigations Dallas in a statement. “Anyone who engages in this type of criminal behavior should know that HSI and its law enforcement partners of the North Texas Trafficking Task Force will work endlessly to remove these predators from our communities.”
Plea papers state Mathis admitted to advertising a 13-year-old girl for sexual services on several commercial sex websites.
A U.S. Attorney’s Office release detailed that Mathis first met the child and began posting her on websites in October 2019, taking the proceeds thereafter. The child reportedly left after a disagreement but returned to him a few weeks later.
Mathis reportedly brought the child in November 2019 to an Irving hotel room where she met with several men. Law enforcement agents trying to find the girl after she was reported missing found her photograph on a CityXGuide advertisement. This is a website federal agents seized in the summer of 2020 for sex trafficking and is now out of commission.
The release detailed that one of the agents texted the phone number for the advertisement and arranged a meeting at the hotel where he posed as a commercial sex patron before immediately recovering the girl from the room.
Surveillance footage from the hotel later showed proof of Mathis renting a room, escorting the girl upstairs and leaving her there, and later returning to retrieve the cash.