A 29-year old man in Massachusetts was charged with kidnapping and sex trafficking after a woman was found to in apparent captivity in the attic of a house near Boston, law enforcement officials said.
On Sept. 20, police in Malden, a city just north of Boston, were called to the residence by the building’s landlord. “The investigation resulted in the discovery of a woman who allegedly had been held against her will and sexually abused for approximately six weeks,” the United States Marshals Service said in a statement.
Jordende Pierre was taken into custody on Thursday, the service said. He was charged in Malden District Court with trafficking of persons for sexual servitude, kidnapping, and indecent assault and battery on a person aged 14 or older, court records say.
He entered a plea of not guilty during an arraignment on Friday, the documents say, and a detention hearing is scheduled for Oct. 6. A lawyer for Mr. Pierre, Arnold Blank, Jr., could not be reached on Tuesday.
The authorities did not identify the woman, nor did they say how old she was.
Dennis Matulewicz, the acting head of the marshals service for the District of Massachusetts, described the allegations in the statement as “deeply disturbing.”
Mr. Pierre and the woman met on a dating app, and he took her to the house about six weeks before she was found, prosecutors said, according to an NBC News report. He sexually assaulted her and forced her to have sex with other men who visited the property, prosecutors said, according to the report.
“She clearly had not eaten. She was dirty. She was living, essentially, in squalor in this attic area,” the Middlesex County assistant district attorney, Jacob McCrindle, said in court, NBC News reported.
The owner of the two-family building, Qing Sun said in an interview on Tuesday that she and her husband went to the residence, which they have owned for two years, to check on a water leak reported by tenants on the first floor.
A man and a woman, former tenants, were in the second floor apartment, even though their lease had expired, she said. Their relationship to Mr. Pierre was not described by Ms. Sun or authorities, and they have not been charged. They followed Ms. Sun and her husband as they tried to find the source of the leak, she said.
Then Ms. Sun asked to check the attic, a dark, cramped, unfinished space under a sloped roof and accessible by a narrow staircase. She said the man questioned why they needed to check there.
“We felt something is wrong,” she said on Tuesday.
As the couple approached the attic, another man — not Mr. Pierre — ran past them and out of the house, she said.
Ms. Sun and her husband entered the attic, using the flashlights from their cellphones. Though dim, they saw the small space had been separated by cardboard into two areas. One side held a mattress. It was messy.
“We turned the corner,” she said, and saw what appeared to be a girl on a thin mat.
“She did not speak with us,” she said. “She was lying down and in a very dark corner.”
Ms. Sun and her husband left quickly and called the police from outside the building. They escorted the officers to the attic, where they spoke with the woman. The couple retreated, relieved. “We knew she was alive,” Ms. Sun said.
After they escorted more investigators to the attic, Ms. Sun said she and her husband noticed a five-gallon bucket that appeared to contain urine.
It was not clear whether there would be more charges connected with the case. A spokesman for the Malden Police Department could not be reached on Tuesday.
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