In months before prostitution raid in Warren, several calls to 911 showed problems

Staff report

WARREN

Warren police said they started their investigation into prostitution and human trafficking at a house on Kenilworth Avenue Northeast on Jan. 25, when a woman alleged that Daniel J. Blasco, 62, was holding her against her will and forcing her to engage in prostitution.

It resulted in police executing a search warrant Sept. 18 at the house looking for evidence of such crimes. Police also arrested Blasco on felony promoting-prostitution charges that morning.

Blasco will be in Warren Municipal Court at 1:30 p.m. today for a preliminary hearing on the charge. He remains in the Trumbull County jail in lieu of $100,000 bond.

But between Jan. 25 and Sept. 18, residents of the 700 block of Kenilworth Avenue Southeast and others reported other incidents that suggested problems at Blasco’s house.

On July 3, a Trumbull County man called 911 to report that his daughter, 22, had returned home that day and reported that she had been held against her will in a camper parked behind Blasco’s house.

The woman told a 911 operator that two other women also were being held against their will there. Warren police went to the home that day, and no one was there.

On Sept. 9, a caller told a dispatcher that a city man, 27, had come to the Kenilworth address, broken everything inside the camper and threatened to kill someone at the house.

Officers also had been to the residence three times the previous night, but 911 records do not indicate why.

And on Sept. 12, less than a week before the raid, a neighbor of Blasco’s called 911 and reported that Blasco and a woman, 21, were outside of Blasco’s home fighting again. The caller said Blasco was “running prostitution out of his house.”

A Warren police officer said he spoke with Blasco, telling him there are problems when a person houses drug addicts and prostitutes, but “I don’t think he understood,” the officer said.

Neighbors told The Vindicator on Sept. 18 that people would regularly bang on Blasco’s door late at night trying to get into the house. They also described women from the house walking up and down the street and people from the house fighting in the street.

A hearing on a request by the Warren Law Department for a restraining order to keep Blasco’s house boarded up as a nuisance was originally scheduled for Wednesday but has been moved back to 11 a.m. Tuesday before Judge Andrew Logan of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court.