Deaths draw prostitution out of shadows for world to see

Gasping for air, whipped to a bloody pulp, Alicia Lee had a modest request of her pimp.

“And she like I can’t breathe, Daddy, my, uh, I can’t really breathe,” Marshall Greene later recounted in a statement to Metro homicide detectives. “I need some water. I said now you want me to care about you, and you didn’t care about me all night?”

Lee’s request for water was denied. Instead, the 21-year-old woman was beaten to death with a belt. Her official cause of death was “multiple blunt force injuries, with a significant contributing condition of asphyxiation.” She suffered more than 65 external injuries, according to the findings of the Clark County coroner’s office.

When police responded to a 911 call early on Oct. 8, 2010, they discovered an unlocked Unit 120 at the Silverado Apartments, 3750 S. Arville St. Lee’s body was found wrapped in a sheet in a bedroom.

Greene admitted to detectives that Lee screamed in pain and was in the fetal position on the bedroom floor of his apartment as he whipped her for losing $300 while gambling with a girlfriend.

“I shouldn’t have to do this shit,” Greene told the defenseless woman as he struck blow after blow.

After turning himself in on Oct. 9, Greene made his voluntary statement to police. In it, he claimed he beat his girlfriend for only 30 minutes. An autopsy conducted by Dr. Lary Simms, Clark County’s chief medical examiner, points to evidence of an assault that lasted as long as three hours, according to court records.

It wasn’t the first time Greene had beaten Lee. The deceased woman’s mother reported he often had been abusive and in February 2010 broke her daughter’s ankle. The mother also admitted her daughter was a prostitute under her pimp’s cruel control.

Greene, a 34-year-old convicted drug dealer out of Southern California, today is charged with Lee’s murder and faces the possibility of the death penalty. His trial is scheduled later this year.

In the aftermath of a deadly argument Feb. 21 on the Strip between two pimps that resulted in three deaths, I have listened to many locals express their opinions and outrage over the violence that made national news and exposed the dangerous jungle that exists in the shadows of Las Vegas Boulevard.

Many point fingers at the murder suspect, Ammar Harris, and have called the man he is accused of shooting to death, Kenny Cherry Jr., just another victim despite evidence he also was a pimp not shy about beating the mother of one of his children until she “saw stars.”

Others have called for more police pressure on the local prostitution culture that thrives here in a place where selling sex is officially illegal.

Still others have seen the violence as a chance to remind the populace of the existence of Assembly Bill 67, which toughens the state’s pandering law, but does so in a way that has its critics clamoring that it’s too cumbersome and possibly even unconstitutional.

The incident has given proponents of prostitution’s legalization an opportunity to espouse their view that the world’s oldest profession, when coaxed out of the shadows, is a victimless crime. We’ll leave that debate for another day.

In Las Vegas, prostitution exists in shadow and light and is far from victimless.

What is also an undeniable truth is that the valley is home to an endless parade of young women who very easily could end up like Alicia Lee, begging for mercy from a merciless animal.

That our legal system has done so little for so long to counter the abuse of generations of those women, many of them poor and most of them defenseless, is a terrible stain on this community.

As troubled as Alicia Lee might have been in this life, she wasn’t just some anonymous street girl, and her slaying should take our breath away.

John L. Smith’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Email him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call 702-383-0295. He blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Smith.