OAKLAND — A local resident has been sentenced to 10 years in state prison in a plea deal that resolved both charges of trafficking a teen girl and possessing a firearm while on pretrial release, court records show.
Algernon Steen, 32, pleaded no contest to human trafficking of a minor and being a felon in possession of a firearm, and was formally sentenced to 10 years in April. He remains at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin and only has to serve half his sentence, as the charges are eligible for a 50 percent reduction with good behavior under state law, court records show.
Steen was charged in 2022 with recruiting a then-14-year-old girl who’d run away from her Fresno-area home into his “team of prostitutes.” Police said at the time that the girl identified Steen as her pimp and said he had trafficked her in “San Francisco, Vallejo, and Los Angeles” and that “she had lived with Steen and the rest of his team since April.”
The girl took the stand at Steen’s preliminary hearing and described her former trafficker as a “wonderful person,” but said she left the experience feeling horrible.
“You feel like you don’t got nobody. Like it is just you. You never know what’s going to happen to you, you never know if you are going to die, you never know what’s going to happen,” the girl testified. “You never know if you are going to get kidnapped. And I feel like all this experience, I feel like it is a lesson learned and I felt like this, it is not for me.”
With the case pending, a judge released Steen without bail, but required him to wear a GPS monitor on his ankle, court records show. While free, he was arrested and charged with gun possession in Berkeley, after someone called police and reported seeing Steen beating an adult sex worker there, court records show.
Steen had two co-defendants in the trafficking case, who were charged with accessory. Both of them were present with Steen when he was arrested in Berkeley, authorities said. One of them later had her case dismissed by prosecutors. The other, Gennitta Long, was sentenced to probation and ordered to stay away from high-prostitution areas in the Bay Area as part of a plea deal, court records show.
Steen will be required to register as a sex offender, and was given credit for about three years he served in jail and on pretrial release, court records show.