Las Vegas woman’s report leads to man’s arrest in sex trafficking case
A California man was arrested on suspicion of sex trafficking after a Las Vegas woman he was dating noticed that another woman with him was in distress and helped her escape, according to a police report.
Oshae Matute, 28, was arrested on a charge of sex trafficking of an adult about a year after a Las Vegas woman called the Metropolitan Police Department to say she had taken one of his prostitutes back to Las Vegas with her, according to an arrest report released late last week.
After the woman called police on Aug. 14, 2019, investigators interviewed the victim and the woman who brought her back, according to the report. The woman said she was dating Matute before she discovered he was trafficking other women, police said.
The victim told police she had worked for Matute for about two months after meeting him in Hemet, California. When she didn’t make enough money as a prostitute, she told police, Matute would kick, punch and slap her. One day, the victim said, Matute took her to an unknown California address to threaten her.
“O’Shae told (the victim) that she was too disrespectful and that he was not playing with her. O’Shae took (the victim) into a room, opened a closet and showed her girls locked in cages,” the arrest report said.
The Las Vegas woman told police she had met Matute on a dating app, and when he came to visit her in Las Vegas, she noticed two women sleeping in his car. Matute told her those were his prostitutes, and after the woman’s 3-year-old daughter saw Matute hit the women, she devised a plan to help them, the report said.
According to the report, the Las Vegas woman traveled to California with Matute and the women he was trafficking, and when Matute left the women alone, she and one of the victims ran to a bus stop, where the Las Vegas woman’s family was waiting to pick them up.
Las Vegas police would not comment on the case, including the allegation about victims in cages.
Matute was arrested on a warrant Aug. 18 and was released the next day on $7,500 cash bail with electronic monitoring. He is scheduled to appear in court on Oct. 5 in Las Vegas.
Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.