My Close Call with Trafficking- The Sound of Freedom Was an Eyeopener!

Hindsight can sometimes be a shocker.

You need to if you haven’t seen The Sound of Freedom yet. It’s a real eye-opener about the sex trafficking of children. After seeing it, I reflected on a time in my tumultuous past and realized I came very close to being a victim.

I grew up in a broken and dysfunctional home. God bless my mother. She did the best that she could. Mom had to work hard as a single parent of three boys and a daughter with zero child support. She worked as a beautician while attending college to get a well-paying job, which she eventually did. Her job at Lockheed building circuit boards paid well enough that she didn’t need a second job, but it took her years to get to that place.

My older brother and I share the same father, and my two younger brothers have the same dad. The fact that neither of them paid any child support speaks to their characters. I never really knew my father, but I remember my first stepfather and his violent bouts well. We escaped from him on Christmas Eve in the middle of the night, but that’s another story.

In many situations, the eldest child in a broken home is burdened with extra responsibilities. In our case, my brother wanted to order me and my brothers around and beat us up if we didn’t do what he said.

That didn’t make for a happy or safe home, so Mom gave me the job of watching my brothers while she was at work. I was also required to keep the house in order. When my brothers wouldn’t do their part, I often did everything myself to keep the peace. It was a lot of responsibility for a ten-year-old.

By the time I was fourteen, I felt like I was thirty. I believed I deserved privileges to match my load of responsibilities. I wanted to go to parties with boys much older than me. I wanted to stay out past midnight. I felt like I was entitled to do whatever I wanted when I wasn’t busy babysitting my brothers and cleaning our house.

My mother and I could not speak to each other. Our conversations quickly turned into screaming matches. Not that I was any match for my mother. She could scare the pants off of you with a look, much less the wrath of her mouth. She also swung a pretty mean belt.

I know mothers butting heads with their teenage daughters is far from abnormal. However, our relationship was downright toxic. I felt overworked and under-loved and was an easy target for a woman I babysat for. She was the mother of my little brother’s best friend, and I watched him and his sister often when she went bar hopping at night. She took lousy care of her children, and her house was a pigsty. But she told me regularly how wonderful and special I was. In my eyes, she showed me more love than my mother did.

When an adult comes home from bar hopping and invites her 14-year-old babysitter to sit and drink booze with her and her new-found sex partner, it’s not a good thing.

Had my mind not been so twisted by the dysfunction in my life, I would have seen red flags and made better decisions. I liked being intoxicated. It made life a little easier to swallow. I took to drinking like a duck takes to water. When Judy showed me where she kept the alcohol away from the kids and invited me to help myself to it anytime I wanted, I felt like a grownup.

She would let me invite my friend, Tammy, over too. The three of us would get pie-eyed and laugh our heads off. Eventually, Tammy and I would stop at her house on the way to school and throw some beers and shots back.

A new school was being built in our district, and until it was finished, both Santa Teresa and Oak Grove High Schools held their classes in the same buildings. Oak Grove students went to school from 8:00 a.m. to noon, and Santa Teresa students started at noon and went until 4:00.

Tammy and I were such goofballs that our first-period teachers didn’t realize we were smashed when we arrived.

Judy was in the middle of a divorce when I started watching her kids. She and her husband sold their home, and she and the kids moved into an apartment complex about four miles from our house. No more getting hammered before school for me and Tammy. Judy started arranging for me and my best pal to come to her apartment for wild parties on the pretense that we were babysitting.

Judy even arranged for fake parents to pick us up and meet my mom and Tammy’s parents. The pretend parents were in their early thirties and could have gotten Academy Awards for their performances. They had young kids, but we would not be doing any babysitting. My mother said in her gut she knew something wasn’t right. She just wasn’t sure what to do about it.

There were always young guys at Judy’s apartment, and I remember many of them being in the service. They were usually between 18 and 25 years old. The booze flowed like Niagara Falls, and we always got very drunk. We drank enough to have sex with guys we hardly knew. Drunk enough to be convinced that I’d led one of them on. So I laid there on a sleeping bag on the living room floor and let him do as he pleased while tears ran down my face. Man, was I messed up in the head.

On New Year’s Eve, after the pretenders picked me up, my mother and her best friend jumped into her friend’s car and followed us to the apartment complex. I didn’t find out about the incident until years later. They had disguises stashed in the car so they could follow us around the complex to see what we were doing without us seeing them. My mother said they quickly lost track of us, and their sleuthing plan didn’t pan out. Apparently, Mom had already talked to someone at the police department about Judy, but without any evidence, they couldn’t do anything to help.

Finally, my mother had all she could take of the situation. She didn’t see any way of keeping me away from Judy and decided her only option was to take me to juvenile hall and turn me in as uncontrollable. On a Sunday morning, when she would typically tell us all to get ready for church, my mother entered my bedroom and said, “Get up and get dressed! You're going to juvenile hall.”

I remember my stupid reply. “You mean we’re not going to church,” I asked. “No!” she shouted. You are going to juvenile hall. I’m done with your drinking and lying. I’m done with all of it!”

She slammed my door, and I heard the phone ring while I was still sitting there with my head spinning. A few minutes later, my mother dragged the kitchen phone into my room and handed it to me. “You have a phone call,” she said. If my brain had been working properly, I would have realized how suspect that was. Why would the woman telling me she was taking me to juvy let me take a phone call?

The guy on the phone went by the name RT. He was one of the apartment complex party boys. He drove a yellow Dodge Charger RT, hence the nickname. His car was fast. I cried while telling him my mother was taking me to juvenile hall. He immediately told me not to worry because he had a plan. He informed me that he would take the license plates off his car and pick me up at my house. He advised me to throw some bare necessities into a bag and be in front of my house in ten minutes. “I’ll get you to Mexico, and your mother won’t be able to touch you there,” he said.

I was up for the plan, but my pride wouldn’t let me leave my house without a shower and some makeup on my face. I told him to make it forty minutes. I hung up the phone, grabbed some clothes, and ran for the bathroom. My mother stopped me at the door. She told me to get dressed now! We were leaving in five minutes.

I’m not sure how long Mom had been taping my phone calls. She was trying to gather evidence to get the cops involved in Judy’s party sex scheme.

Once Mom heard that RT was planning on whisking me away to Mexico, she knew she needed to move fast. Following her instructions I dressed, grabbed my sweatshirt, and shoved my journals into the sleeves. I didn’t want her to get ahold of the written evidence of my party lifestyle.

She and my third stepfather walked me to his truck. They made me sit between them so I couldn’t jump out at a stop light. Believe me, I would have. I remember us walking up to a massive metal door and my mother pushing a buzzer. A man’s voice over the intercom said, “Can I help you, ma’am?” She leaned into the intercom on the wall and said, “I’m bringing my daughter in. She is uncontrollable!” A loud buzzer sounded, and the door popped open. I was taken to an intake room while my mother and stepfather spoke with the authorities.

I’d never been so scared in my life, and many scary things have happened to me. I was handed pants, a shirt, granny panties, and a spiral bra. I think they starched the bra. The pointy tips at the nipples stood out like spikes. The cotton underpants were so big that they went up to my tiny boobs.

A female employee pointed me to the large stall with about eight shower heads. She instructed me to put all my belongings in a bag and wash my hair with lice remover. I didn’t have lice! It was so degrading. I didn’t like showering in school in front of the other girls. Showering in front of Nurse Ratchet and then being subjected to a cavity search was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life.

I wound up living in the Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall for four months while waiting for a foster home. There is a lot more to that story, but I’ll save it for another day. The point of this story is to share how easily I could have wound up as a trafficked sex slave.

In retrospect, I’m reasonably sure that Judy was collecting money from the guys at her party for sex with me. I will never know how long she was able to abuse young girls that way. She even tried drawing me into a lesbian relationship with her. My Christian roots went far enough that it was a bridge I had no intention of crossing.

What happened to me took place almost fifty years ago. Kidnapping and selling kids into sex trafficking rings is so much worse now.

I had no idea how bad it was until I watched the movie Sound of Freedom. The numbers are staggering, and they are breaking all records with our open borders. I won’t extend my post with a lot of statistics, but you can easily research the subject. I think it’s vital that people are aware of what’s going on and do what they can to help.

This perversion will not be stopped if we don’t get involved. We’ve had our heads in the sand too long. I’m so grateful for the Sound of Freedom movie shedding light on this issue. If you’re not familiar with the story about the film, please go and check it out.

See the film, donate to a charity fighting sex trafficking, and keep your eyes and ears open. If you see a child with an adult that looks terrified, don’t ignore it. See something, and say something. I’d rather be wrong and embarrassed than right and complaisant in a kidnapping and destroying a child’s life.

It was important for me to share my story. People are listening and wanting to help. Here are some statistics that should shock you.

Here are the links to a couple of great charities that are fighting to save our children from this atrocity.