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Girl, 14, charged in killing of LA anti-sex-trafficking activist's daughter

Nathan Solis, Los Angeles Times on

Published in News & Features

LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles police arrested a 14-year-old girl in the early morning killing of a woman who was shot on a street corner in South L.A.

The teenager is accused of shooting Kendra McIntyre, 20, just before 4:30 a.m. on March 21 while she was standing at the intersection of 70th and Figueroa streets, the Los Angeles Police Department alleged in a news release Tuesday.

The suspect was identified by LAPD homicide detectives Monday and taken into custody at a police station less than a mile from where the shooting took place. The Los Angeles District Attorney's office charged the unidentified teenager with McIntyre's murder, but there was no information about a motive or whether the girl acted alone.

There was also no information about why McIntyre was standing on that particular street corner two hours before dawn.

McIntyre's mother, Debra Rush, believes that her daughter was being forced by South L.A. gang members to sell sex when she was shot. Homicide investigators have not provided any information about what McIntyre was doing in a part of South L.A. known as a sex-trafficking corridor.

Years before, Rush found herself in the same part of South L.A.

 

In the mid-2000s, Rush was kidnapped from her home in Fresno and forced to engage in sex work to pay back a drug debt her mother owed, she told The Times. One of the places her captors put her to work was on Figueroa Street. She eventually ran away and found her way back to Fresno.

Rush is the founder of the nonprofit Breaking the Chains, an organization that seeks to connect victims of sex trafficking with resources that can help them find housing and other services to escape their traffickers. Rush founded the organization in the San Joaquin Valley, where McIntyre was raised, Rush wrote in Facebook posts honoring her daughter.

"Kendra was an all-around amazing human being; fiercely loyal, beautifully artistic, hilarious, outgoing, and loving," Rush wrote in one post.

In a message posted Wednesday on the Breaking the Chains Facebook page, Rush thanked the LAPD for "tirelessly working to bring closure" to her family, but she added there was still sorrow in her world and "no justice can fill the void" of losing her daughter. She wrote that her daughter had experienced trauma as a child and suffered from "severe mental health issue(s)."

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