Five people face charges in a crackdown of a Howard County-based human and drug trafficking organization, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office said Friday, including a “particularly violent” suspect accused of “lining up” trafficked women and beating them.

Isaiah “Zay” Robinson, 29, is also alleged to have lit one of the women’s hair on fire, and bragged about stomping on a woman’s head, showing a bloody shoe to another woman to intimidate her, the attorney general’s office said in a news release. Robinson, of Columbia, is represented by the Office of the Public Defender, which did not return a request for comment.

The charges stem from an alleged sex and drug ring operating out of hotels and motels along the Route 1 corridor in Jessup, where authorities say the group coerced approximately 17 trafficked women into performing commercial sex, according to the release.

The organization recruited women “because of their drug dependency,” and would induce them to continue performing sex work by keeping the women “in insurmountable amounts of arbitrary debt,” the release says. The group would facilitate “dates” on behalf of the women and reap the profits by providing the women access to drugs and free housing at the motels, the office said.

“When the women were non-compliant or accumulating an arbitrary, unacceptable amount of debt, they would be intimidated, threatened, beaten, and prevented from accessing drugs, causing severe sickness due to withdrawal symptoms in order to force them to continue performing commercial sex dates,” the office said in the release.

State prosecutors said that in addition to using the drugs to manipulate trafficked women, the organization would redistribute drugs in the community. One person who purchased drugs from the group was found dead from a fentanyl overdose hours later, and individuals associated with the organization overdosed on at least ten occasions, “sometimes fatally,” the office said.

“This violent criminal organization exploited vulnerable women through addiction, used threats and violence to control them, and distributed deadly drugs that claimed at least one Marylander’s life,” Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a statement, noting that his office was “committed to supporting the victims with the services they need to rebuild their lives.”

Authorities seized seven firearms, over $150,000 in cash and a large quantity of fentanyl, heroin and cocaine, according to the release.

The indictments were filed earlier this year in Howard County and Anne Arundel County circuit courts. The crackdown came at the same time Howard County lawmakers, spurred by human trafficking and drug sales at lodging establishments along the Route 1 corridor, voted to ban hourly room rentals at hotels and motels.

“Drug and sex trafficking will not be tolerated in Howard County,” Howard County Executive Calvin Ball said in a statement, calling the allegations of sex trafficking “grave injustices that affect individuals regardless of race, age, gender, or nationality.”

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