SACRAMENTO, CAUnited States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner announced today that Dominick West, 29, of Sacramento, was sentenced  by United States District Judge Edward J. Garcia, to 10 years and one month in prison for interstate transportation of a minor with intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. West will serve his federal prison sentence concurrently with the 51-year sentence he is currently serving as a result of his conviction in Sacramento Superior Court for the 2007 murder of a young woman leaving a nightclub with her friends.

According to court documents filed in the case, on January 11, 2008, police received a report of a 15-year-old runaway from Montana. The police learned that the girl was being offered as a prostitute on Craigslist, and an undercover police officer made a date to meet her. The officer met her in a Sacramento motel room, confirmed that she was in fact the 15-year-old runaway, and took her into custody.

The girl told police that she had run away from her home in Montana at Wests urging when she began talking to him online. West paid for a bus ticket for the girl to come to Sacramento from Montana, and she arrived on December 25, 2007. West met her at the bus station and took her to a female friends apartment where he had the woman post an ad on the online service RedBook offering the girl as a prostitute. The girl prostituted for West out of a Sacramento motel for two days.

This case is the product of an extensive investigation by the Innocence Lost Task Force, which includes agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Sacramento Police Department. Assistant United States Attorneys Carolyn K. Delaney, Jill M. Thomas, and Kyle F. Reardon prosecuted the case.