Mayor Sheila Dixon said Wednesday that the city is working around the clock to get prostitutes off the streets and protect them from violent predators.
“We’re working 24/7 with BSAS [Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems] and other outreach organizations who work with prostitutes to help the women get treatment,” Dixon said at a news conference Wednesday in response to The Examiner’s series on unsolved prostitute slayings and the perils of the city’s underground sex trade.
“We know they need help, and we’re doing everything we can at the moment to make sure they get it,” she said.
In The Examiner series, called “The Killing Fields,” women who sell their bodies for as little as $20 a day in Southwest Baltimore shared their struggles with drug addiction and the constant threat of violence. The Examiner reported 26 prostitutes have been slain in the past decade in Baltimore. Six of those cases have been closed with an arrest.
Police have since increased their presence in Southwest Baltimore, and on Tuesday evening undercover officers conducted a sting on Washington Boulevard, arresting and taking nearly a dozen prostitutes off the streets, according to witnesses.
Police also created a task force of five veteran homicide detectives after The Examiner reported last month that five prostitutes have been strangled to death slain since April.
But a family member of one victim said he was frustrated with the city’s slow response and the lack of progress in his sister’s case.
“We just want to know who killed her,” said Jimmy Wright, brother of Brenda Sue Wright, 46, whose skeletal remains were found behind an abandoned tractor-trailer in 2000. Police believe Brenda Wright was strangled.
“I know the police are very busy, but it’s just hard not to know what happened,” Jimmy Wright said.
Wright, a 50-year-old Baltimore County construction worker, said the lack of progress in his sister’s case remains painful.
“Even though Brenda was addicted to drugs and was prostituting doesn’t mean she deserved to be strangled,” he said. “She struggled with depression all her life, she just couldn’t get clean. People have to remember I loved my sister no matter what she did.”
Baltimore City detectives’ cold case squad recently charged William Brown with the 2004 murder of one prostitute and a teenage girl, and the brutal rape of another prostitute in 2003. Brown has not been linked to any of the recent strangulation cases, police said.
