A Pulaski County jury ordered the owners of a west Little Rock Motel on Friday to pay a woman forced into a sex slave $477,000 in damages for providing a safe haven for her sex-trafficking tormentors, a verdict that puts end to a four-day trial before Circuit Judge Chip. Welch.

Plaintiff Jane Doe had sued Patel Legacy Hotels LLC, which operates America's Best Value Inn at 200 S. Shackleford Road, after nearly dying in the motel parking lot more than four years ago from poisoned drugs she had purchased there. .

Security was so lax that hotel management was unaware that police and paramedics had been at the hotel to save Jane Doe's life until the lawsuit was filed in 2021, her lawyers said.

“This motel was a shelter [for] criminals,” attorney Meredith Moore told the jury in closing arguments. “The way the motel acted, like she always has, they ignored her and almost let her life slip away.”

In addition, motel operators Rick and Jay Patel “knew that criminals are drawn to their hotel because conditions are favorable to criminals,” Moore said. They “know this and don't care because they were making money. Their failures created the perfect stormy environment for sex trafficking and criminal activity.”

With an eye on profit over people, the operators of the $65-a-night hotel provided little security for guests, allowing the 2-acre property near the intersection of Shackleford Road and West Markham Street to attract criminals. the lawyers said.

Moore and fellow attorneys Denise Hoggard and Eric Wewers of the law firm Rainwater, Holt & Sexton said all the motel needed to make the grounds safer was to make a greater effort to report suspicious activity to the police, add more staff and do better monitoring. facilities, as with random security patrols of the property, they said.

The only way to get hotels to take security seriously is to show them there's a cost if they don't, Hoggard said. Money is all they understand, he said.

“The motels make money. The dealers make money. The victims don't,” he said. “You can send a message to this hotel, and to all the hotels that operate like this, that we will not tolerate this. Make a difference. Make the change. Take their money.”

They said the hotel's owners ignored a request from the Little Rock police chief in 2019 to help law enforcement control drug trafficking in the area while missing out on free opportunities to learn how to operate more safely. , including specialized training to recognize and combat the “modern slavery” that is sex trafficking.

Raped as a child, Jane Doe was prostituted at age 12 by her mother, who then addicted her to drugs, the woman said. She told the jury that she wasn't quite sure how she ended up in Arkansas several years ago, saying that she was in Texas when her pimp told her she was taking her to Louisiana and that she was so high she didn't remember. have arrived here.

Describing a four-month routine that involved regular visits to the motel, she said her exploiters, different men at different times, would bring her to the hotel once a month, where they would put her in a room for three days, estimating that she would serve a average of 10 men a day.

“If I didn't, they'd beat me up,” he said, telling jurors that he was nearly killed in an incident. “I was there to work.”

They would not keep her there for more than three days at a time to avoid attracting attention, the woman said. They almost never rented rooms under her name. She couldn't rent a room because she didn't have identification.

A trafficker forced her to get a tattoo symbolizing her name to mark her as his property, she said, as her lawyers showed a photo to the jury. Jane Doe said she still fears and will always fear her traffickers will find her and kill her, testifying that she has no interest in seeing them prosecuted because that would require her to sacrifice her anonymity. Suing the motel under the civil trafficking statute, Arkansas Code 16-118-109, allows her to seek some measure of justice, while preserving her safety, she said.

“I should have been protected when I was at America's Best Value Inn,” she told the jury.

The night she was given the poison pill, Jane Doe said that she and her pimp had argued over money.

“He said we were going to America's Best Value to make some money,” the woman tried.

She said she was at the end of an eight-day sleepless meth binge and had taken a Xanax from someone in the motel room, hoping it would help her sleep. The next thing she said that she remembers is waking up in intensive care, where she spent the next three days.

The woman proved that she could have been lying on the ground for up to six hours before someone called for help. Reviving her took three doses of Narcan and suffered respiratory failure requiring incubation.

She also learned in intensive care that she was pregnant with her sixth child, the only one she has been allowed custody of.

She was able to sober up, begin counseling, and earn her high school diploma thanks to the efforts of Partners Against Trafficking Humans, a nonprofit advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse and sex trafficking. Raising her child is what keeps her motivated to succeed, she told the jury, saying she hopes to stay in therapy for the rest of her life. She is taking classes at the university and hopes to one day be a mortician.

Her past life still has some control over her, Jane Doe told the jury.

It has scarred her with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, she said, describing how she still struggles to trust others, control her occasional angry outbursts and overcome the bad dreams that regularly keep her awake.

The motel denied any wrongdoing, and attorneys David Donovan and Bradey Baltz argued that the company, which operated a “low-budget motel,” did everything that could reasonably be expected to ensure the safety of customers.

They said the motel operators, Rick Patel, 33, the manager, and his uncle Jay Patel, 59, of Denton, Texas, the company founder, vetted their guests to avoid renting to rioters and renewed the security cameras to discourage criminal activity. Furthermore, they discussed whether the Jane Doe was as helpless as she claimed, noting that she had shown, on occasion, that she was free to come and go. Also, she had been clean and sober before, but then she got back into the sex life, they said.

By siding with the plaintiffs, the jurors would be setting an unreasonably high standard for the motel and others like it, the lawyers said.

But the jurors, after about three and a half hours of deliberations, discovered that the hotel had not done enough for the Jane Doe. They found their damages were worth $900,000, with American's Best responsible for 53% of that, $477,000.

Jurors found that Jane Doe was 7% responsible for what had happened to her, with the remaining 40% of blame being attributed to the man she described as her main trafficker, although he is not a party to the litigation.

Jane Doe's lawyers had asked for $1.2 million, citing evidence that the motel is earning $1.4 million a year, based on admissions that the facility has 80 rentable rooms with a daily occupancy rate of 60 rooms, for a total of 21,900 rooms sold per year at $65 per stay.