Men pimped girls out of Glendale home

GLENDALE ? Two men were sentenced in January to serve a combined 36 years in state prison for sexually exploiting underage girls in a prostitution and pornography operation they ran out of their Glendale home, police said.

Kasey Lee Stinson, 21, and his cousin Stephen Mark Stinson were charged in July 2004 with more than four dozen felony counts of sexual exploitation, prostitution, child pornography, child pimping and unlawful sexual intercourse with minors and pornography, Glendale Police Det. Matt Irvine said.

Kasey Stinson accepted a plea bargain, and was sentenced to serve just shy of 12 years in state prison in January.

Stephen Stinson was found guilty on eight counts of child prostitution, sexual exploitation and pornography in December and was sentenced in January to 22 years in state prison.

An additional four years was added to Kasey Stinson’s sentence because he lied under oath during his cousin’s trial, Irvine said.

The two men rented a home on West Lomita Street in March 2004 and for three months ? until police uncovered the operation ? began prostituting girls as young 15 years old, Irvine said.

Glendale Police uncovered the ring by accident.

After receiving calls about a disturbance at the Lomita Street home, Glendale Police Sgt. Tom Kuh arrived and heard a woman screaming and being slapped inside, Police Sgt. Tom Lorenz said. Kuh entered to find a man, later identified as Kasey Stinson, beating a teenage girl. After separating the pair, Kuh came across another teenage girl.

“Out of a rear room comes this 15-year-old girl, and [Kuh] peeks into the bedroom to see what he thinks might be child pornography; he sees mirrors, Web cams and a huge sex toy on the floor,” Lorenz said.

Kuh contacted the Police Department’s sex crimes unit, and detectives arrived to learn that Kasey Stinson had been arrested two months earlier for pimping and beating a 15-year-old girl in Hollywood, Lorenz said.

After securing a warrant to the search the home, detectives found business cards for escort services, handwritten notes for distinguishing clients from police and notes for bachelors parties throughout Los Angeles, Irvine said. Police seized computers and compact discs containing video and still photos of teenage girls posing nude and engaging in sex acts. A website contained more images of nude girls advertising them for prostitution, and detectives found a pornographic video, with images of Kasey Stinson and several girls. Kasey and Stephen Stinson had also set up an escort service website where they would represent the underage girls as being over 18, Irvine said.

“It was pretty clear what we had was a prostitution operation, but fortunately this whole thing was very embryonic when we hit them,” Irvine said.

Police identified six underage girls ? one of whom grew up in Glendale ? involved in the prostitution ring, which extended from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and likely beyond, Lorenz said.

“It was a partnership that was about sexual exploitation of teenage girls,” he said.

Some of the girls were runaways and others had come from “well-to-do” families, Lorenz said, adding that there are likely other victims.

“There are still other children that have yet to be identified in sex videos and we hope to one day identify who those individuals are, not only to help them but to find additional suspects,” Lorenz said.

Police kept quiet about the arrests and the case to protect the girls’ identities as the trial progressed, Lorenz said.

“This was something that was kept under wraps,” he said. “The most important facet of the criminal investigation was to make sure that the juvenile girls involved in this case were able to step up to the plate in a very confident manner and testify in court and not be exploited in the papers so that they, as young as they are, can get their lives back on track again.”

Stephen and Kasey Stinson are serving their time.