A man from Ecuador who was living in Minnesota at the time has been sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for taking a 14-year-old girl across state lines after meeting her in Muscatine and having sex with her last year.
Luis Moreira Bravo, 27, was also order to serve five years of supervised probation and pay $100 to the Crime Victims’ Fund as part of his sentence on a charge of Transportation of a Minor.
According to court documents, Bravo traveled to Iowa in May 2020 to meet with a fourteen-year-old minor he had met through social media.
Prosecutors said the two discussed engaging in sexual activity when they met in person, and after meeting at her home went to another location to have sex multiple times.
After sleeping overnight in the vehicle, prosecutors said Bravo drove the victim to Minnesota the next day where they had sex again.
The girl’s family reported her missing and she was located by authorities. Bravo was initially charged with first degree kidnapping among other counts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Muscatine Police Department, St. Paul Police Department, and Minneapolis Police Department collaborated on this investigation to locate the victim.
This case was prosecuted by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Iowa as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s “Project Safe Childhood” initiative, which was started in 2006 as a nation-wide effort to combine law enforcement investigations and prosecutions, community action, and public awareness in order to reduce the incidence of sexual exploitation of children.
Any persons having knowledge of a child being sexually abused are encouraged to call the Iowa Sexual Abuse Hotline at 1-800-284-7821.