Prosecutors drop charges against Yakima man in teen sex-trafficking case as part of plea deal

Yakima County prosecutors dropped commercial sex abuse charges against a Yakima man accused of paying to have sex with a teenage girl.

At a sentencing hearing Wednesday in Yakima County Superior Court, Jose Alonso Ocampo, 52, pleaded guilty to an unrelated charge of second-degree unlawfully possessing a firearm in violation of a court order. In return for that plea, prosecutors dropped felony harassment, fourth-degree assault and possessing a firearm in a prohibited area that were filed in that 2024 case.

As part of the plea deal, prosecutors also dropped four counts of commercial sex abuse of a minor, and one count each of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes and promoting the commercial sex abuse of a minor.

The latter charges stem from his arrest in 2020 after he paid a teenage girl’s mother to have sex with her daughter.

In the 2024 case, Ocampo is accused of pulling a gun on a man at El Faro bar and threatening to kill him. At the time of the incident, Ocampo was under an order in the 2020 case to not possess firearms.

Ocampo was sentenced to a day in jail, with credit for four months he had spent in jail before posting bail.

Attempts to contact Yakima County Prosecuting Attorney Joe Brusic about the sentence were not successful. He did not return phone calls by press time.

In an interview in February about another man who received a one-day sentence for having sex with the teenager, Brusic said he could not comment because it would compromise pending cases in the matter.

Ocampo was one of 11 men accused of having sex with the girl when she was 14 or 15. Of the 11, Ocampo and eight others were accused of paying to have sex with the girl. One man was accused of raping the girl.

The arrests were made after Yakima police responded to a 2020 call for a then-15-year-old girl going through opioid withdrawal, according to court records. She told police that her mother got her addicted to pain pills and she started having sex for money to pay for the drugs, court documents said.

When her mother learned what she was doing, the mother then started setting up appointments with men for her to “make sure she did it safely,” according to the documents.

Detectives identified her customers through her cellphone records, court documents said. 

Ocampo paid to have sex with the girl at least four times, according to a Yakima police affidavit, and he knew the girl was under 18. Ocampo denied having sex with the girl when questioned by detectives, admitting that he had sex with her mother and gave her money.

The girl’s mother was sentenced to almost 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts each of promoting the commercial sex abuse of a minor and violating a no-contact order, as well as one count each of commercial sex abuse of a minor, giving Percocet to a minor, witness tampering and an unrelated eluding charge in 2021.

The Yakima Herald Republic is not naming the woman to protect her daughter’s identity. The newspaper typically does not name sex-crime victims without their consent.