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Dallas case illustrates how this high-tech tool can help solve crimes against sex workers

A California mother was last seen on video stepping inside the cab of a semi outside a Northwest Highway hotel in Dallas. Her body was later found dumped in East Texas.

At the appointed hour, a young mother stepped inside the cab of a semi-trailer parked in a hotel parking lot. The trucker had requested the woman’s services.

She was never heard from again.

About a week later, in late August, Caleigha Zangari’s body was found in a wooded area off a rural highway in East Texas. A bag was tied over her head.

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Sex workers are a frequent target of violent crime — and those crimes have traditionally been among the most challenging to solve.

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Zangari, 25, is one of what police believe are at least four sex workers killed in the Dallas area over the past 12 months. In each case, an arrest has been made, in large part due to advances in technology and one specific high-tech crime-fighting tool: license plate readers.

License plate readers have spread rapidly to cities across the country, to help police solve crimes and locate missing people. The cameras scan license plate numbers and store them in a database. The plate numbers are run against separate databases of vehicles associated with crimes or police investigations. The solar-powered cameras can also capture a vehicle’s make, model and color. The images are typically deleted from the system after 30 days.

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Dallas has added dozens more of the plate readers in recent years, at the urging of former Police Chief Eddie García. A Dallas police spokesman said the devices “have been very successful in recovering stolen vehicles and assisting in criminal investigations.”

Khadija Monk, a criminal justice professor at California State University in Los Angeles, said license plate readers, in combination with surveillance cameras and cell phone technology, are increasingly resulting in justice that has often been elusive.

The readers, she said, “complement other technological innovations that enhance the ability to track offenders.” Especially, she noted, when technology coincides with “good old-fashioned investigative techniques.”

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The technology could be especially helpful in aiding investigations into crimes against sex workers and other more easily preyed-upon targets of violence.

The FBI in 2004 created a Highway Serial Killings initiative to study about 800 murders, mostly involving vulnerable women, since the 1980s.

Some truckers picked up their victims in one state, murdered them in another, and dumped the bodies off highways in a third state.

Four sex workers killed in Dallas

The Murder Accountability Project, a nonprofit dedicated to documenting unsolved homicides, says more than 316,000 Americans have perished in unsolved homicides since 1970.

The four Dallas-area killings highlight the danger to those who work in the sex industry.

Oscar Sanchez Garcia, 25, was arrested and charged in the deaths of three women who were stabbed in Oak Cliff last year. Police said two of the women had ties to prostitution.

Yons Alshabli, 32, is charged with the July murder of a woman found shot to death in a far Northeast Dallas parking lot. Alshabli told police he picked her up with the intention of taking her to a motel and paying her $70 for sex, records show.

Naasson Hazzard , 28, of Austin, was indicted Oct. 1 in federal court in Dallas on a charge of kidnapping leading to Zangari’s death. He remains behind bars after a federal judge ruled in September that strong evidence indicated he harmed Zangari.

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Caleigha Zangari.
Caleigha Zangari.(Zangari family)

Monk said the nature of sex work involves anonymity, discretion and secrecy, all of which makes the workers easier targets. Sex workers also are more reluctant to seek help from law enforcement, Monk said. And they are likely to take risks, she said, such as accepting rides from strangers at night or going places they normally wouldn’t venture.

“Sex work is based on invisibility and transiency,” Monk said. “Often, the sex worker wants or needs to stay off the radar.”

And when victims go missing, she said, there’s not always someone looking for them.

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“These are people who live on the margins of society,” she said. “Society’s view on sex workers is, ‘Don’t waste your time on them.’”

Claire Crouch, spokeswoman for the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office, said her office handles cases of violence against sex workers with a “victim- and trauma-informed mindset.”

“Our aim is to connect these women with services,” she said, “and the main goal is to get to the traffickers.”

Zangari’s case is a window into not only the dangers of sex work but the role technology is playing in assisting law enforcement.

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A California plate, a Texas trucker

Zangari joined the U.S. Army after graduating high school in California. She served from 2017 to 2020, according to military records, and was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

She was charged with prostitution in 2022 in Arizona. The outcome of that case was not clear from court records. She gave birth to a boy in July 2023, and she had a tattoo of her baby’s footprints on her torso, according to social media posts.

Two of Zangari’s family members reached by phone declined to comment, and others could not be reached by phone or email.

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Her social media posts portray a loving mother and military veteran. Zangari described herself online as a shy “girl next door” and worked as a freelance escort.

Her last Facebook post, in July, featured a photo of her with dyed red hair looking at her year-old son.

Weeks later in early August, Zangari set off from her Southern California home with her child to visit relatives in Texas, according to court records.

Along the way, she advertised her services on commercial sex websites, court records in the case said. One of them, date unknown, ended with this: “Please be prepared to be screened. Gentleman only. Respect, safety & discretion is mandatory.”

Caleigha Zangari pictured at her high school graduation.
Caleigha Zangari pictured at her high school graduation. (Zangari family)

Her grandmother, with whom she lived in California, last heard from her Aug. 14, court records show. The grandmother, who communicated daily with Zangari, reported her and the child missing after not being able to contact her for several days, court records show.

The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office passed on the missing persons report to Homeland Security Investigations due to concerns about human trafficking. Court records note Zangari’s child was found and returned to family, but provides no other details.

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Agents ran database queries for Zangari’s license plate and learned from one of the city’s plate-reading devices that her Chevrolet Equinox SUV had been in Dallas from Aug. 12-15, at a hotel on Northwest Highway. The hotel is located in what Dallas police have designated a “high crime area for prostitution,” the federal criminal complaint said.

License plate reading cameras installed on a Denton Police Department vehicle, Thursday,...
License plate reading cameras installed on a Denton Police Department vehicle, Thursday, October 9, 2014, in Denton, TX.(David Minton / DRC)

Agents spoke to hotel employees who confirmed Zangari stayed there. Her vehicle was later towed to an impound yard.

Agents obtained her phone records and learned that Zangari exchanged about 13 “communications” with a phone number belonging to Hazzard, the truck driver, between Aug. 13-14, court records show.

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They also viewed hotel security video. It showed Hazzard’s semi parked in the lot that night — and Zangari enter the cab before the truck drove away, records show.

Agents also spoke to one of Zangari’s friends, who provided information about the location of Zangari’s phone using the “Find My Friends” app. The final alert the friend received indicated the phone was in the 4100 block of the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in Dallas about 5 miles north of the hotel, the complaint said.

Agents and police officers went to that location and found Zangari’s cracked cell phone on the highway, the complaint said.

Cell phone data proves key

Agents used location data based on Hazzard’s use of his cell phone to locate him Aug. 22. They pulled over him and his wife in his semi after following it some distance.

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They questioned him about the missing woman. Hazzard confirmed Zangari entered his truck at the hotel parking lot after the two communicated by phone, the complaint said, but he declined to provide any information about her whereabouts.

Agents were able to use Hazzard’s cell phone data to reconstruct his movement the night he met Zanagari. The data indicated Hazzard traveled eastbound from Dallas on Interstate 30 near Mount Vernon in East Texas and then south. At 2 a.m, now Aug. 16, it tracked him to a rural area of Titus County near Texas Highway 11, according to the complaint.

It was at that location his phone stopped moving for about 35 minutes.

Agents searched the Titus County location Aug. 23. During their search, a rancher who lived nearby approached them and said he recalled seeing a semi-truck parked on Highway 11 during the early morning hours of Aug. 16, court records say.

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Caleigha Zangari is shown decorating her nursery.
Caleigha Zangari is shown decorating her nursery. (Zangari family)

The man led agents to where he saw the truck. While agents searched, the rancher discovered the decomposing body of a woman “concealed within a wooded area” close to the highway, with a black trash bag over her head and tied at the neck.

Later that day, Hazzard was arrested on a kidnapping warrant out of Dallas County.

Prosecutors filed a notice Nov. 4 of their intention not to seek the death penalty. On the same day, Hazzard’s attorney said in a filing that his client has “unequivocally maintained his innocence.”

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Hazzard also filed a motion to dismiss the indictment. A judge has not ruled on the request.

“The Defendant remains incarcerated at a time when his wife is pregnant with their first child,” the defense attorney, Paul Lund, said in the filing.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Renee H. Toliver told Hazzard during a Sept. 13 detention hearing that the evidence against him, while largely circumstantial, was credible and serious and indicated the victim met a “violent end at your hands.”

A trip to South America?

Toliver said Hazzard posed a risk to others based on his behavior. The day after the victim’s body was dumped in a wooded area, Hazzard returned to the location in his personal vehicle and remained there for about an hour, the judge said.

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Toliver also cited evidence Hazzard tried to destroy evidence by cleaning his truck cab and disposing of his cell phone. The judge said the kidnapping happened “along one of his routes and was random.”

Charles Self, a Homeland Security Investigations agent, testified during the detention hearing that Hazzard’s wife was looking into taking a trip to South America with her husband after the alleged kidnapping.

And he said Hazzard had a prior violent encounter with a sex worker.

Hazzard was arrested on a robbery charge in Austin in 2023 after he was seen dragging a prostitute across a parking lot, the agent told the judge. Hazzard allegedly took the woman’s backpack but no charges were filed in the case.

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Self also said he found a website that sex workers use to review customers. Hazzard was identified as a customer based on his phone number, and the trucker received a negative review from someone who wrote that he was “not a safe person,” Self said.

The exterior of the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas on Monday, July 29, 2024.
The exterior of the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas on Monday, July 29, 2024. (Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer)

Self said it appeared Zanagari’s cell phone had been thrown from the moving truck.

“It removed her ability to communicate with the outside world,” he said during questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney Brandie Lou Wade.

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Concerns over privacy

Lund, the defense attorney, noted his client does not have a criminal record. He asked during the hearing if Self had any evidence the victim’s phone was thrown from the truck while on the Dallas highway as opposed to it falling out. The agent said he did not.

Lund also asked the agent during cross-examination whether he’d obtained a DNA sample from the rancher who found the body in East Texas. Self said he did not but the investigation is ongoing. DNA samples from Hazzard’s truck and on items found with the victim’s body were still being analyzed as of Nov. 4, prosecutors said.

Lund told the judge the South America vacation trip, which had been planned before the events in question, had been canceled.

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He declined to discuss the case with The Dallas Morning News at the hearing, and he did not return an email seeking comment.

A January trial date has been scheduled in the case.

If Hazzard is convicted, technology and the license plate reader, in particular, will have played an important role.

That said, there are concerns about such technology — and the ways in which it might be used by authorities to violate privacy. The city of Austin recently changed its policy so data from the readers is kept for a week instead of 30 days.

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State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, said he will once again introduce a bill to curb the use of license plate readers because of “liberty and privacy” issues.

“My concern about them is the exact same concern that our founders had with unwarranted search and seizures,” he said. “Over my dead body will Texas become a totalitarian police state.”

Harrison said if police want to use such a tool to help solve crimes, they should be required to obtain a warrant. He said his bill, which failed to receive a hearing last session, also has a provision to limit the storage of license plate data on the cameras.