OAKLAND — It all started with a report of a stabbing at an East 12th Street hotel.
Now, police say they’ve located two girls who were listed as missing persons and identified the man who was allegedly trafficking the teens, including by buying rooms for them to stay at the hotels and meet adults.
The June 1 incident has resulted in human trafficking, solicitation and pandering charges against 21-year-old Marquise Malik Webb, a resident of Antioch and Oakland who allegedly trafficked the girls while out on bail in a grocery store robbery case. Webb has pleaded not guilty and is at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, with bail set at $500,000, court records show.
Oakland police say the investigation started with a 911 call regarding a robbery at the America’s Best Value Inn on East 12th Street, near Lake Merritt in Oakland. Investigators identified both the victim and the suspect as 17-year-old girls who were listed as missing from different parts of California, including one who had been detained before in undercover prostitution stings.
The stabbing victim was in the hospital being treated when police say a woman with an extensive criminal record came in, claimed to be a social worker and attempted to intervene with the police questioning. She refused to provide credentials and the incident only further aroused investigators’ suspicions that the girls were being exploited, authorities said.
Before being booked for alleged assault, one of the girls requested to call someone who was saved on her phone as “Mr. Billionaire.” The number turned out to belong to Webb, whose name had already surfaced in another trafficking investigation, authorities said.
In 2024, a girl reported to police that Webb had trafficked her from age 14 to 17, and that she earned $15,000 for him by traveling to Las Vegas during the Super Bowl. He used the money to buy a home in Antioch, she claimed to police. By late March 2024, police believe the girl was also being trafficked by a 26-year-old Concord man who was never charged, but who was arrested last January on suspicion of leading officers on a high-speed chase through Sonoma County.
Last February, police identified Webb as one of two suspects in the armed robbery of a grocery store on the 3400 block of Adeline Street in Oakland, where one man brandished an assault rifle and another cleaned out the register, before they both fled in a white Lexus sedan. Webb posted $75,000 and was out on bail when this case surfaced.
Police say that the teens’ phones contained texts where one of the girls sent Webb “sexually explicit photos of herself and requested he bring her more condoms,” as well as ads of the girls on prostitution sites. Another conversation included Webb telling a girl to “stick it out” when she told him “I don’t wanna be out here.”
Webb was present during the stabbing, but told police he was simply trying to intervene and prevent violence, according to police. He allegedly refused to detail what he’d witnessed.
The America’s Best Value Inn has come up in several other trafficking investigations over the past three years. Last October, police tracked a missing 12-year-old girl there and identified a man who allegedly sexually abused her. A Sacramento County man was charged with pimping a woman out of the hotel last December. In 2022, a Richmond man received a six-year prison sentence for pimping a woman who reported being battered by him in one of the hotel rooms. An undercover sting there resulted in a two-year prison term against a suspected pimp in 2023.
The city of Oakland had previously identified the East 12th Street hotel as a hub for prostitution, and attempted to shut it down in 2013. Back then, it was an Economy Inn, but owned by the same firm that operates the America’s Best Value Inn chain.