A 38-year-old Brooklyn man and a 19-year-old woman have been indicted on charges accusing them of trafficking a 16-year-old girl who had run away from a group home, in a case that stretched from Brooklyn to a hotel room in Newark, New Jersey, before the teen was rescued by federal agents. Carlton Foster and Jaeandrea Herriot face a seven-count Supreme Court indictment that includes promoting prostitution and endangering the welfare of a child, with Foster alone charged with child sex trafficking.
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced the indictment Tuesday, according to the Kings County District Attorney's Office. Foster was arraigned on August 12 and is being held on $200,000 cash or $1 million bond, while Herriot was arraigned Tuesday before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun with bail set at $5,000 cash or $25,000 bond. Both are due back in court on October 14. As News12 Brooklyn reports, investigators say digital communications showed the girl was being promoted for sex online.
How the Case Began With a Group Home Runaway
The joint investigation started on March 10, after authorities received a referral that a 16-year-old girl who had run away from her group home was suspected of being a victim of commercial sex trafficking, per the district attorney's office. The case sat with that referral for weeks before a break came from an unrelated police encounter.
On April 3, detectives from the NYPD Human Trafficking Squad obtained the teen's cellphone following that unrelated encounter with Brooklyn police. A forensic examination of the phone uncovered extensive prostitution-related messages involving Foster and Herriot, the district attorney's office says, and investigators later found online ads that featured the girl.
A Rescue From a Newark Hotel Room
The case then jumped state lines. On May 7, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children notified the FBI of active online prostitution advertisements featuring the 16-year-old in Newark, New Jersey, according to both the district attorney's office and the Brooklyn Eagle. FBI agents set up a meeting and rescued her from a hotel room that same night.
The speed of that timeline underscores how quickly commercial exploitation of a missing minor can move across state lines and online platforms — from a Brooklyn group home to an out-of-state hotel room in a matter of weeks. Nationally, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children assisted law enforcement with 29,568 missing child reports in 2024, safely recovering 91% of those cases, according to the organization's own data.
What the Charges Carry
Foster's child sex trafficking charge falls under New York Penal Law § 230.34-a, which classifies sex trafficking of a child by an adult 21 or older as a Class B violent felony punishable by 5 to 25 years in prison, according to the New York State Senate. Under that statute, a defendant's claimed lack of knowledge about a victim's age is explicitly barred as a legal defense.
The promoting prostitution counts both defendants face fall under a related statute: promoting prostitution in the second degree, defined as advancing or profiting from the prostitution of a minor under 18, is a Class C felony carrying up to 15 years in prison. Foster, at 38, and Herriot, at 19, are now facing very different degrees of legal exposure under that framework, even as they were indicted together.
Part of a Broader Local Pattern
Statewide data from the New York State Interagency Task Force on Human Trafficking shows that 64% of confirmed human trafficking victims in New York are victims of sex trafficking, and 43% of all confirmed state cases originate in New York City, according to the Fast Law Firm's summary of that reporting. Brooklyn prosecutors have brought a string of similar cases in recent months, including an August conviction against Curtis Brown for running a decade-long trafficking ring.
Open questions remain about how Foster and Herriot allegedly first targeted the teenager, whether other people were involved in the scheme, and what support services the girl has received since her rescue. Neither the district attorney's office nor the Brooklyn Eagle has addressed those points publicly. Both defendants are expected back in court on October 14.
