A man who recruited two 16-year-old girls to be sex workers at Baton Rouge motels was sentenced to five years in prison Monday.
Chad Armstead, 31, pleaded guilty to pornography involving a juvenile and two counts of human trafficking during a hearing inside the 19th Judicial District Courthouse.
District Judge Will Jorden sentenced the Baton Rouge man to 10 years on each of the trafficking convictions, but suspended five years of the term for each count and ordered Armstead to serve the sentences simultaneously. He also imposed a concurrent 20-year sentence for the child porn confession and suspended 15 years of the time in lockup, leaving a balance of five years behind bars for all three charges.
After he is released, Armstead must serve three years of state probation and will be required to register as a sex offender for 25 years, according to the judge’s sentence.
The trial was supposed to begin Monday on allegations Armstead used Instagram in early 2023 to recruit the two teenage girls, who were runaways from Department of Children and Family Services custody. He forced them to work as prostitutes, hiding the fact that they were underage in online sex advertisements, and kept a lion’s share of their earnings for himself, according to authorities.
The ¶¶Ňőh State Police Special Victims unit began investigating in April 2023 after responding to a hit-and-run accident in which the girls were injured. Armstead’s arrest affidavit indicates they crashed hours after escaping the man by stealing his car.
One of the teens told state troopers she ran away from DCFS on Feb. 24, 2023, and began staying with an older man she identified as Armstead. He reached out to her on social media months before, and when she met with him shortly running away, they began having sex. According to the arrest report, he infected the teen with a sexually transmitted disease.
Following that initial encounter, he made the girl pose for racy photos that he used to post as sex advertisements on trafficking websites.
Prosecutors said Armstead arranged the meetups and forced the girls to have sex with men for money. One of the victims said he kept 80% of the profits she made, telling investigators most of the rendezvous occurred at one of three Capital City locations: the Paradise Inn on Airline Highway, Oyo Hotel on Gwenadele Avenue, or Motel 6 on Rieger Road.
One of the girls said Armstead referred to himself as their “pimp” and slapped her when she told him she wanted to stop having sex for money.
The second victim said she met Armstead about two weeks before the hit-and-run and he immediately told her to "go get in the shower so she could take nude pictures." He posted the photos on three websites and began promoting her as a sex worker.
