The victim is a suspected sex buyer, but he said on the witness stand that he was just giving the 18-year-old woman a ride when she suddenly grabbed at his belt buckle.
OAKLAND — A man and a young woman have been charged in connection with a violent robbery in a local inn, which police say started with a prostitution transaction.
Nicholas Lewis, 31, and Janiya Brown Lee, 18, were charged with robbery and elder abuse, while Brown Lee faces an additional felony charge for allegedly spraying the 69-year-old victim with pepper spray. The two were charged in February and held to answer at a March 27 preliminary hearing, records show.
A trial date has not yet been set.
RELATED: He took a prostitute to an Oakland motel. Next thing he knew he was being robbed
Police say that the alleged victim was attacked at the Travel Inn on the 400 block of West MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland on the night of Jan. 11. On the stand at the preliminary hearing, the man denied he was paying for sex, instead stating that Brown Lee “flagged me down” and asked for a ride to the hotel because it was an “emergency.”
When they got there, he claimed Brown Lee grabbed at his belt buckle but he protested, telling her, “I’m a married man,” a transcript of the hearing says.
“She tried to give me some (oral sex), and I told her, ‘No,’” he testified. “And then she went and knocked on the door. And the guy came in. And that’s when I started getting beat up.”
The man was sprayed in the face, punched several times and robbed for $122, according to court records. Neither defense lawyer argued against the charges in court, and a judge held both defendants to answer without commenting on the case.
At the hearing, Brown Lee’s lawyer appeared to cast blame on Lewis, stating that Brown Lee has no criminal record and was “caught up in a lifestyle she doesn’t want to continue.” Both she and Lewis are out of jail, with a judge freeing Brown Lee and Lewis posting $75,000 for his release, court records show.
“This is a situation where I think she was being somewhat manipulated into doing what she was doing at the time of this incident,” Brown Lee’s lawyer, Joe Mastro, said at the hearing. “She’s young, she’s impressionable.”
After the hearing, police arrested and booked Lewis on a warrant, for allegedly pimping Brown Lee, records show. He was subsequently released from jail again and hasn’t been charged with pimping or pandering, records show.
But police say that that Lewis, who was convicted of pimping in Orange County in 2020, is well known to vice investigators in Oakland. He has been picked up in other pandering investigations and remains the subject of a pandering and pimping probe. A review of his and Brown Lee’s phones yielded messages where they discuss prostitution and bicker about it, authorities said.
“I always have hella (prostitutes) I’m not these lil boys (sic),” Lewis allegedly wrote in one text during an argument with Brown Lee. “I’m a real pimp you can quit with all that.”