Say Her Name - He Went Looking for Her and Set Her Workplace on Fire
Fire crews were called to Fuji Super Spa near Cahokia Heights (Illinois) at about 3:15 a.m. on Monday, October 19.
When they arrived, the building was fully engulfed.
There are no fire hydrants in that area. Crews had to truck in water. Firefighters from at least ten departments fought the blaze for hours, and the flames and smoke were visible for miles.
Eight people were inside. Seven got out. One woman, an employee, did not. It took cadaver dogs and an excavator to find her remains in the rubble.
More than a week later, she still has not been named. The St. Clair County coroner says her identity has not been confirmed.
The man charged with killing her has a name. Quentin Hanks, 36, of St. Louis, was arrested in St. Louis and charged by federal criminal complaint with arson. According to the court documents, he confessed to using a lighter to set couches on fire at two businesses: One Spa, where he says he paid for sex, and Fuji Super Spa, next door.
He told investigators why. He wasn't satisfied with the "sexual services" he paid for.
This Was Targeted
Here is the detail that should have led every story, and mostly didn't.
According to the court documents, Hanks said he set Fuji on fire because the masseuse he was angry at also worked there.
Read that again. This was not a man lashing out at a building. He was angry at a woman. He set fire to the place where he'd been with her. Then he went to her other workplace and set that on fire too.
That is not arson in the abstract. That is a man going after a woman across two job sites with a lighter.
We don't know whether the woman who died is the woman he was angry at. The reporting doesn't say, and nobody should guess. It doesn't change what he did. He went where he knew she worked, at 3 a.m., and lit it. According to the complaint, he warned no one and assumed people could be inside. There were eight.
The Headline Is His Mood
Now look at how it was written up.
Man burned down massage parlor, killing woman inside, over sexual encounter. Man mad about sexual services. Man upset over sexual encounter. He "wasn't satisfied."
Then the affidavit's details about his sexual performance went public, and the coverage got worse. Within a week, radio station websites were running his inability to finish as the punchline of the headline. A woman is dead and her name isn't public, but the internet knows exactly how his evening went.
The grammatical subject is his dissatisfaction. The woman is a dependent clause. The motive gets narrated as though it explains something.
It explains nothing. Plenty of people are unhappy with what they paid for. They leave a bad review. They ask for a refund. They do not burn down two buildings full of people.
If a man set fire to a woman's workplace because he was angry at her after a date, we would call it what it is: targeted violence against a woman. The only thing that makes this read as a smirking "sexual encounter" story is that the woman gives massages, or is presumed to sell sex. That's the whole difference, and the coverage leans right into it.
We've seen this frame before. In March 2021, a man killed eight people at three Atlanta-area spas, six of them Asian women. A sheriff's spokesman told reporters the shooter had had "a really bad day." Same move. His interior life, front and center. Their lives, an afterthought.
She Let Him Sleep It Off
The federal complaint includes another detail that belongs at the top of every story.
An employee at One Spa recognized Hanks from prior visits. That night he was intoxicated. So she let him sleep in a back bedroom.
Sit with that. A worker looked at a drunk regular and decided the safe thing, for him and for everyone on the road, was to let him sleep it off. That is harm reduction. Sex workers and massage workers do it every night, unpaid, uncredited, and unseen.
He woke up, decided he'd been shortchanged, and picked up a lighter.
Same Address, Different Consequences
On Monday, the Belleville News-Democrat dug into the property's history.
One Spa sits at 220 S. 88th St. A decade ago, that address was the Pink Spa. In 2014, its owner, Kyong Suk Kipilla, was indicted for breaking up bank deposits into amounts under $10,000 to avoid IRS reporting. Federal court records described the business as a prostitution operation. She took a plea deal. Her sentence: two years of probation and a $20,000 fine.
The year after the indictment, a company called RGK Properties took over the property's tax payments. RGK is owned by her son, Ronald G. Kipilla. It now owns both spas that burned, plus a third. He confirmed his ownership to the BND and declined to comment further.
To be clear: no one has accused the current owner of anything. The 2014 conviction belongs to his mother, and it was for structuring deposits. It says nothing about the women who work there now, and nobody should read it that way.
But look at how the consequences landed. The person who ran the business a decade ago got probation and a fine, and the property stayed in the family. The women working at that address got no plea deal and no LLC. One of them got a fire.
That's what criminalization does. It doesn't remove the money or the property. It removes the workers' protection.
And the headline on that BND story? It links the burned spa to "owner of prostitution business." The building's past now sits next to the dead woman's story. Her name still isn't in it.
"A Commercial Business"
The ATF's statement on the charge says that intentionally setting fire to a commercial business endangers employees, patrons, first responders, and the surrounding community.
All true. Also: one of those employees is dead, and the man who did it says he was aiming at a woman who worked there.
The charge on file is still a single count of arson. On Friday, Hanks waived both his preliminary and detention hearings. He's in the custody of the U.S. Marshals, and the case now goes to a grand jury. No new court date will be set until the grand jury decides whether to indict.
U.S. Attorney Steven Weinhoeft has said his office will conduct a full grand jury investigation before seeking an indictment. He has also said he expects to upgrade the charge if the investigation confirms her death resulted from the fire. Federal arson carries far heavier penalties when someone dies. The grand jury is where that upgrade happens, or doesn't. We'll be watching.
Weinhoeft also declined to comment on the allegation that Hanks paid for sex. Good. Keep it that way. The question in this case is whether a man burned a woman to death, not what was or wasn't for sale before he did.
Why Did She Go Back In?
The Signal Hill fire chief has said he doesn't know why she ran back into the building, and that his department had spent the prior week teaching people how to escape a fire safely.
We don't know why she went back in either, and no one should invent a reason on her behalf.
But anyone who has worked in a criminalized, cash-based workplace can list the reasons people go back. A coworker still asleep. The cash that can't sit in a bank account. The ID, the phone, the papers that make everything else possible. Fire safety advice assumes you can afford to lose what's inside. A lot of workers can't.
And when your work is criminalized, you aren't in a position to demand alarms, marked exits, or a landlord who picks up the phone. Asking for basic safety invites the attention of the same authorities who can shut you down. Add a neighborhood with no hydrants, and you get a building that burns until there is nothing left to search but rubble.
Watch What Happens Next
One Spa is open again. On Friday, workers were fixing a wooden fence, and a neon sign in the window said the massage parlor was open.
Of course it is. The women who work there still have rent due. The fire didn't change that. It only made the job more dangerous.
Cahokia Heights police have said any investigation into the paid-sex allegations would be handled by federal agencies. So the federal government now holds two cases in its hands: the one against the man who set the fires, and whatever it decides to do about the women he set them on.
Here's the pattern we've seen too many times: a man commits violence at a massage business, and the official response aims not at men like him but at the women who work there. Nuisance abatement. A raid on whatever is still open. A press conference about "trafficking." Workers arrested, displaced, or handed over to immigration. The business shut down, and the women who survived pushed farther into something more isolated and more dangerous.
The property history just handed anyone inclined toward that playbook a ready-made excuse. That's exactly why we're saying this now, before it happens.
Remember how this case was solved. According to the court documents, investigators were led to Hanks by the spa's employees and customers. One employee picked him out from a state ID photo. The workers are the reason he is in custody.
Punish them now, and the lesson every massage worker in the Metro East learns is simple: next time, don't talk.
Say Her Name When We Have It
Until then, we refuse the headline.
She was not a setting. She was not a motive. She was not "sexual services." She was not a punchline about a man's evening, and she was not a footnote to a building's history.
She was a woman who went to work. She was a coworker someone went looking for. She was one of eight people inside a building a man set on fire on purpose, knowing they were there.
Criminalization didn't light the match. By his own account, Quentin Hanks did. But criminalization is why men like him assume the women inside don't count, why the people who profit from the address walk away with a fine, and why the people reporting on it so often agree.
We don't.
December 17th is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.
It started in 2003 as a vigil for the women murdered by the Green River Killer, a man who told investigators he chose sex workers because he believed no one would miss them. Twenty-three years later, a man burns down a woman's workplace over a sexual encounter, and the headlines are about how his night went.
This year, when we read the names, we may not have hers. We'll hold a place for her anyway.
Here's what you can do between now and then:
Show up on December 17th. Find a vigil near you or organize one. A few people, a few candles, and a list of names is enough. If you're in the St. Louis or Metro East area, hold space for the woman who died on South 88th Street.
Give money to sex worker-led organizations. Not rescue groups. Not "anti-trafficking" outfits that raid the people they claim to save.
Fund the people doing the work: support lines, reentry, legal help, rent money. SWOP Behind Bars is one of them.
Hold the press accountable. When a sex worker is killed, write to the outlet. Ask them to center the victim, not the killer's motive or mood. Ask them to name her when she's identified, and to stop turning violence against women into punchlines.
Oppose raids in your community. If police or prosecutors answer violence against massage workers or sex workers with raids, arrests, or immigration referrals, call your local officials and say so, publicly and on the record. Survivors and witnesses should never be the ones who pay.
Support decriminalization.
Violence thrives where workers can't call the police, screen clients, work together, or demand safe workplaces without risking arrest. Learn where your state's lawmakers stand, and tell them.
Believe workers, and listen to them.
The people who identified Quentin Hanks were the workers themselves.
They know what keeps them safe.
Ask them, and follow their lead. She went to work.
She should have come home.
On December 17th, and every day after, we remember. And we fight.
