Girl, 14, arrested on prostitution charges

Jace Radke

Friday, Aug. 31, 2001 | 10:25 a.m.

Metro Police arrested a 14-year-old girl on prostitution charges Wednesday and also arrested the man who detectives say brought her into town on a Greyhound bus.

The girl was the 73rd juvenile arrested for prostitution this year as part of Metro's Operation Stop, a program that focuses on rescuing juvenile hookers from a life of prostitution.

The girl was picked up by an undercover vice officer on Las Vegas Boulevard near Main Street, Sgt. Brian Evans said.

"She had worked as a prostitute before, but this was the first day that she was in Las Vegas," Evans said.

The girl was brought to Las Vegas to work as a prostitute by a man from California, police said.

Detectives arrested Dontay Lane Wednesday on charges of kidnapping, pandering a child and living from the earnings of a prostitute.

"The guy that brought her here was an opportunist," Evans said.

Lane was booked into the Clark County Jail, and the girl is in custody at the Clark County Juvenile Jail, Evans said.

Metro has been aggressively targeting juvenile hookers since the Stop program's inception in 1995. The program is aimed at getting underage prostitutes off the streets by identifying them before they've been on the street for long and by going after pimps.

Detectives work closely with Clark County's Family & Youth Services Division to contact relatives and arrange homes for the children, who are usually placed on some form of probation, police said.

About two thirds of underage prostitutes arrested in Las Vegas are from out of state, police said, and are transported here via the "West Coast track" -- a circuit of cities in Western states that pimps rotate girls through so that arrests don't stack up against them.