Updated at 11;45 a.m., June 4, 2015
A man who posed as a teenager to lure a 14-year-old girl from Utah to Los Angeles for sex was sentenced Thursday to more than five years in federal prison, to be followed by 25 years of supervision.
Donny Larnell Wade, 35, of Pomona used the online persona of a 17-year- old he named Hanna Leak in March 2013 to meet girls he thought lived nearby, asking several whether they liked “black guys.”
Around that time, federal prosecutors said, Wade encountered the victim on the social networking site MeetMe.com and persuaded her to leave home, buying her a one-way bus ticket to Claremont.
When the girl arrived, the two went to a motel, where Wade had sex with her, according to documents filed this week. Police tracked Wade and the teen by following her computer use, and she was returned to her family.
Wade pleaded guilty last July to a federal count of transporting the girl between states with the intent of having her engage in criminal sexual activity.
U.S. District Judge George Wu rejected a defense argument for a four- year prison term, and instead sentenced Wade to five years and four months behind bars.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Dore said Wade is “unquestionably a predator.”
“The presence of adult pornography on his phone, and not child pornography, actually makes this clear,” the prosecutor wrote in sentencing papers. “Defendant was not acting on impulses. He did not necessarily want to have sex with a child. But he knew that children were more vulnerable and more likely to fall for his ‘Hanna’ ruse.”
—City News Service