Former Tri-Cities pro fighter trafficked women using fear and violence to keep them in line
A Tri-Cities gang leader has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for forcing women with threats and violence to provide sex for money.
Lance Ray Horntvedt Sr., 36, pleaded guilty in Franklin County Superior Court to one count of first-degree sex trafficking and five counts of second-degree sex trafficking from 2015 to 2018.
According to court documents he is the leader of the Gangster Disciples.
He admitted to taking a 19 year old from Utah to Washington state without her family’s knowledge and then hiding her. He told her she would go on “dates,” but that sex would not be involved.
However, a day after arriving in Washington she was coerced into providing sex to Horntvedt’s heroin dealer for money after she heard Horntvedt threaten two other women, according to court documents. She feared Horntvedt would hurt them if she did not do what Horntvedt demanded.
The 6-foot-8 former professional fighter is accused of assaulting the women under his control, including lifting them by the throat and choking them.
The 19 year old begged to return to Utah, but Horntvedt refused and he took her iPad, cellphone and clothes. She was in Washington for three weeks before she was able to contact her parents, who sent her a bus ticket.
In another instance he recruited a woman in her early 30s to provide paid sex. He frequently assaulted her in front of others and threatened her to make her continue working for him, according to court documents.
Witnessing those assaults, another woman in her early 40s continued to provide sex for money.
According to court documents, Horntvedt recruited her into his sex trafficking operation by telling her she would make lots of money but then he took all the money she was paid. He also forced one woman to sign over her car title to him.
He told a woman in her early 30s that if she tried to leave he would find her. And he told a woman in her early 20s that “if people were really telling on me they wouldn’t be breathing anymore,” according to court documents.
Attempt to withdraw plea
Horntvedt attempted to take back his guilty plea made in April 2021, but Superior Court Judge Alex Ekstrom refused.
According to court documents, Horntvedt had been told that the prosecution would ask for a sentence of 66 years if a jury found him guilty, rather than the 25 years it recommended in a plea agreement.
Horntvedt, who is Black, argued his guilty plea was not voluntary because he was told that a jury who heard the case would likely be mostly white even if the trial was moved to another county. Horntvedt also said that his grandmother had asserted undue influence to persuade him to accept a plea deal.
When he’s released from prison, Horntvedt must register as a sex offender.
And he was ordered not to contact the women he sex trafficked for 50 years.
His crimes had “an extremely negative psychological impact on all six victims involved, some of which are still experienced to this day,” said Franklin County Prosecutor Shawn Sant in a statement.
Horntvedt criminal history
Sant said it was a “very complicated and complex case” that included 185 pages of police reports, numerous search warrants and hundreds of hours of jail phone calls. At one time he was in jail and telling women he would beat them up if they were not working enough.
The case investigation started in December 2017 with a sex trafficking sting at My Place Hotel in Pasco.
Horntvedt has a criminal history stretching back to felonies for residential burglary in 2000 and second-degree malicious mischief in 2001, both when he was a juvenile.
He is guilty of seven previous felonies as an adult for crimes that include third-degree assault, a hit and run injury accident and attempting to elude police.
Horntvedt also is facing a felony charge in federal court of conspiracy to provide prohibited objects to an inmate as part of an alleged conspiracy to smuggle drugs and cell phones into the Benton County jail.
This story was originally published May 16, 2022 at 5:00 AM.