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CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Eric Javon Thompson looks defiant in his most recent mug shot. The 26-year-old has traded in his yellow polo for a prison jump suit. Raleigh Police hunted Thompson down here in Charlotte, arrested him, and charged him with four crimes including robbery, assault by strangulation, and human trafficking.
Thompson’s accused of forcing four women into “involuntary servitude,” over a period of time that started in November 2013 and ended in late June 2014. Warrants reveal he also choked two of the women, only identified by their initials, to the point of nearly losing consciousness. CMPD tells WCCB that when officers found Thompson in Charlotte, he was with one woman who was “involved in advertising prostitution services.”
Ashley Harkrader co-founded All We Want is Love, a Charlotte organization that works to educate the community on what trafficking is. She tells WCCB News @ Ten anchor Morgan Fogarty that Thompson’s arrest is just the beginning of the healing process for his alleged victims. Harkrader says, “There’s a huge relief there, because obviously they’re out of the situation that they were in, but then they also have to deal with the stigma that society has placed upon them without being educated enough about trafficking and the being labeled as a prostitute.”
WCCB asked the FBI about human trafficking in Charlotte. A spokeswoman replied in part, “The Charlotte metro area sits at the intersection of three major highways. Many traffickers are transient in nature and move city to city. There is no accurate way to rank the problem for comparison purposes. The FBI recently added human trafficking to the Uniform Crime Report. In the coming years, we hope to get a truer, more accurate picture of its reach.”
Thompson regularly gives police different home addresses. Records show when he was arrested in July for drugs, he told cops he lived in California. When he was arrested Tuesday, Thompson told them he lived in Jacksonville, North Carolina. He’s being held on just over one million dollars bond.
For more information on All We Want is Love, go to http://www.allwewantislove.org/.
