A Hillsborough County court made the decision on Monday to keep a Tampa woman in jail pending her trial. The lady is accused of using her adolescent appearance to entice teenage boys into sexual encounters.
In court, 23-year-old Alyssa Zinger requested to be released from custody before to her trial. Following his November arrest, Zinger was accused of five charges of criminal lewd or lascivious molestation and two counts of felony lewd or lascivious battery.
Zinger allegedly had a sexual interaction going on with a teenage male, according to detectives. The case started in May 2023, when she is said to have become friends on Snapchat with pupils from Tampa’s Woodrow Wilson Middle School.
Investigators suspect she engaged in at least thirty sex acts at the house of a student, who was between the ages of twelve and fifteen, according to court filings.
According to investigators, several sex acts were captured on camera and sent over Snapchat to other students. Zinger denied any complicity to such accusations.
Detectives have stated that the inquiry into that case resulted in the identification of four more victims, including the one that brought Zinger back before the court on Monday.
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“This case represents only one of the multiple, juvenile male victims, that Ms. Zinger was not only contacting and having sexually explicit messages with through social media, but also meeting and having actual sexual contact with,” Traci Dishman, a Hillsborough County prosecutor stated.
In her testimony on Monday, Tampa Police Detective Amanda Baranowski stated that Zinger misled a 14-year-old child into believing she was 16 years old when, in reality, she was 21. In other situations, she is accused of pretending to be 14 years old.
The investigator mentioned that there might be more victims and that her probe is still underway.
“The state would argue there are no conditions of release reasonably sufficient to protect the community from the risk of physical harm to persons and specifically to male individuals under the age of 18,” Dishman stated.
Zinger has been detained since the other purported victims came forward in April.
Since Zinger had a history of psychological problems and had not broken any laws during her first pre-trial parole, the defense asked the judge to take these factors into account. But the judge decided to side with the prosecution and mandated Zinger’s detention until her trial.
