CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A 28-year-old man who used social media to recruit women and girls as young as 15 into a prostitution ring was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in prison for human trafficking and other criminal charges.

Dorian Brown helped Jason Dowell run a prostitution ring out of hotels across Northeast Ohio that prosecutors say at times featured as many as 10 women, including three girls between 15 and 17 years old.

Prosecutors say the men exploited weaknesses in each of the girls to get them to join the ring. They dangled the allure of money and expensive clothes to escape a life of poverty for some of the girls. They promised exclusive relationships and preyed upon drug addictions, prosecutors said.

"I'd like to apologize to all the women involved, and I'm ready to get my life back on the road," Brown said before Common Pleas Judge John P. O'Donnell sent him to prison for close to two decades.

The investigation that landed the men in the sights of authorities started after an 18-year-old woman was shot and killed in July 2015 at a Warrensville Heights hotel that Brown and Dowell frequently used in their prostitution ring.

Prosecutors said Brown discovered that one of his former prostitutes was working out of the same hotel, and he hired two men to rob her.

The men, Octavius Hudson and Marcellus Webster, set up a tryst through a Backpage.com ad. The woman brought Elizabeth O'Brien with her to the encounter and, when Hudson pulled the pistol and held it to the woman's head, O'Brien rushed him to try and take the gun. He fired a single fatal shot into O'Brien's chest.

Hudson and Webster both struck plea deals and agreed to testify against Brown, and investigators obtained phone records that showed Brown exchanged several text messages with them throughout the night of the encounter.

Jurors found Brown not guilty of the murder, but convicted him of human trafficking.

Hudson was sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility after 23 years. Webster was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Warrensville Heights police set up surveillance on Brown outside an Independence hotel and learned that the FBI was also investigating Brown on human trafficking charges.

Brown, Dowell and a woman, Gabriel Rogers, were eventually arrested.

Dowell pleaded guilty to human trafficking and is set to be sentenced next month.

Prosecutors say Rogers was the men's top prostitute and was in charge of posting ads for the girls and enforcing the rules of the operation, a position known as the "bottom." She pleaded guilty to a promoting prostitution earlier this year and is set to be sentenced Oct. 4.

Rogers denied the allegations in a phone conversation on Friday.

"I definitely was prostituting, but I didn't work for either one of those guys," Rogers said.

She said she felt pressured into taking the plea deal, which included an agreement that she would testify if Brown and Dowell's case went to trial. But Rogers said she didn't tell prosecutors anything beyond what they already knew because she didn't work for them, let alone control the women. She said she now lives life looking over her shoulder because people accuse her of being a snitch.

"I did not do anything to those girls," she said. "Those girls did what they wanted to do. I can only control what I can do."

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