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LONG BEACH -- The term human trafficking brings dark, shadowy images to mind.
One might picture poor and desperate foreigners smuggled into the United States or other countries and held in servitude in sweatshops, working in deplorable conditions.
Or perhaps it conjures images of young girls being shipped all over the world, where they are forced into lives of prostitution.
According to the U.S. Department of State, approximately 600,000 to 800,000 victims annually are trafficked across international borders worldwide. They are forced into either sex or labor trafficking and more than half are children.
But not all the victims come from outside the U.S. or are poor and neglected.
"Our experience is human trafficking crosses all color lines and it crosses all socio-economic lines," said Long Beach Police Department Missing Persons Detective Kenneth Turner.
Many are raised in middle-class families, like Kenny Owen's daughter, Marla, who at 14 ran away from her life as a freshman at Wilson High School and was pulled into the underworld of drugs, prostitution and human trafficking.
"I had never even heard of this before," Owen said during a recent interview in a North Long Beach coffee shop.
Sadly, Owen is now an expert on human trafficking and the devastating effect it wreaks on victims and their families. The hard-working, blue-collar dad of two daughters and one son said Marla was a quiet, naive girl when she started her freshman year. Owen worked the night shift then and Marla's mother worked days. Their son has autism and their eldest daughter was already graduated from high school and working. With Marla in the middle she probably felt left out at times, he mused. With both parents at work, Marla was able to intercept phone calls saying she was not attending classes. Warnings of failing grades were not passed on. Marla made friends with a girl who worked for a pimp, Owen later learned. That girl, a teen herself, was adept at finding suitable children, girls with low self-esteem who could be easily manipulated. Marla proved to be the perfect target. When she ran away just days before her 15 th birthday, she went straight to the friend, who delivered Marla to the pimp, Owen learned through years of police investigations and private detective work and tens of thousands of his own dollars. "She left in her pajamas, before I got home," Owen recalled. The frantic father immediately tried to get Marla's cell phone records from the pay-as-you-go plan he paid for, but it proved to be a long, hard fight. "Detective Turner had to call them and convince them I was her father and to give me the information," Owen said. "It took days." Phone trail followed Once he had the records, Owen and his oldest daughter began poring through lists of hundreds of calls. They eventually found the number of a man whom Owen and his oldest daughter determined was a john after she called the man and pretended to be Marla. "Her voice sounds almost exactly like Marla's, so she got him to agree to meet with her," Owen said. The distraught father -- who is an extremely large man, though he has a sweet and patient temperament -- set up a meeting with the john in a dark alley, where Owen took his brother-in-law for backup. "I told him we wouldn't do anything to him as long as he was straight with me," Owen said. The john immediately admitted he paid to have sex with Marla more than once and gave Owen information about her pimp, who he knew to be in Los Angeles. The tip came too late. "I didn't know it then, but I know now that she was already out of state," Owen said. Nationwide search Owen learned his little girl was put to work as a prostitute immediately and arrested at least 13 times all across the country over the next two years. Pictures on her cell phone, which was found after it had been ditched to sever her ties with home, showed her in a Mercedes with her middle-aged pimp and a video of him molesting her. Arrest records showed Marla was moved to San Diego, to Las Vegas -- where she obtained a real driver's license with the I.D. of an 18-year-old woman -- and to Atlantic City. "They have a circuit of selling children for sex in all the major cities in the country," Owen said. "That's what's driving this, the demand for sex, for paid sex with children." Owen had Marla fingerprinted as a child and thought police would be able to use those prints to find her, but the cards proved to be worthless. due. Turner said another detective in the LBPD turned Marla's fingerprints over to the Justice Department, but a problem in the system made it impossible to match Marla's childhood prints to the prints she had on file as an adult through her fraudulent Las Vegas driver's license. "When missing fingerprints or unidentified fingerprints went into the system and when an identified person's fingerprints went into the system there wasn't a system in place to cross compare (the two)," Turner explained. "That problem has since been fixed." Marla finally came home on her accord, sick of her father's public efforts to track her down through media and the Internet, he said. No happy ending By then she had a major drug habit and though she talked about going to school and returning to a normal life, her addiction proved too powerful and she continued to run away, her dad said. "She's been arrested more than once since she came home," Owen said, noting that during one of Marla's stays in juvenile hall she earned her GED. Photos taken of Marla and used in various missing person's posters show her fresh-faced with light blond hair and impish blue eyes at age 14. Pictures taken again after her first return home at 16 show a girl who appears 10 years older, not just two. "I've met with other parents, and it's like they get brain-washed," Owen said while flipping through a heavy black five-inch binder that holds pictures of Marla, case files, hand-scribbled notes, clippings and other bits and bobs from years of searching. Those years took a toll on the family, not only financially but emotionally. While Marla was missing and somewhere in Atlantic City, Owen heard from police friends that four prostitutes were murdered. "That's that worst part about having a missing child out there; you never know if she's going to be one of the ones you hear was killed," he said, his blue eyes that resemble Marla's clouding with tears. Turner said Marla met the profile for victims of human trafficking perfectly. She was shy, quiet, not likely to question those she perceived as being in charge and had fragile self-esteem. The girls often don't get, or don't think they get, enough attention and affection at home, the detective said. The pimps are almost always well into their 20 s, and often in their 40 s while the average age of most victims who fall prey is 12, Turner said. The pimps also put victims through a program of sorts, one well-documented and glorified in movies and books, that includes a period of charm training and gifts as well as abuse and molestation, Turner explained. Today Marla is 19 and barely speaks with her father, though he still holds out hope that the damage done to his daughter can be reversed, or at least tempered. "I'm building that relationship. She doesn't know it, but I'm getting there," he insisted, his big, burly hands brushing across a picture of Marla. "I know she doesn't like me doing (interviews), but I tell her that if she wants me to stop she has to stop." Owen isn't focusing solely on Marla; the angry dad also wants to see justice with her pimp prosecuted. "He had three children he was selling for sex, he charged $250 per half hour," Owen said. Case goes cold Owen said local police worked with him closely but since they turned the case over to the FBI he hasn't heard anything. Owen is also pushing hard for safety measures to help other families avoid his family's tragedy. That includes his personal crusade to see live-scan fingerprints done on all public school children at a young age, preferably during elementary school. Owen has talked to support groups, such as the Polly Klaas Foundation, and elected officials, including Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Long Beach, about the ability of live-scan technology helping police find children and adults. Live-scan prints taken of Marla after her first return home helped Long Beach detectives track her down within less than 48 hours the second time she ran away, he said. "She was arrested the next day in Oregon," Owen said. "They found her in one day." Owen also said he would like to see cell phone companies forced to provide call records and other information immediately to parents in the case of missing minors. "It has to work in minutes, not hours, not days," he said of the system of turning over records. Turner shares Owen's desire to never see a case like Marla's again. To that end, Turner held an unprecedented training session last July for police officers and other first responders on how to recognize victims of human trafficking and what to do when they come across such victims. "The biggest issue with human trafficking is awareness," Turner said. "When the general public sees it, they're absolutely unaware. When police officers see it, they know something is wrong but they can't quite put their finger on it." Turner's daylong seminar drew more than 200 people from more than 35 different law enforcement and nongovernmental agencies to Long Beach. Those at the seminar included personnel from the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Immigrations and Customs, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, Orange County Sheriff's Department, San Diego County Sheriff's Department and the U.S.Coast Guard. Attendees learned about the warning signs and the questions to ask possible potential human trafficking victims. They also learned that though many victims run away or go with pimps willingly, they are victims who have been indoctrinated into a lifestyle, much like battered women, Turner said. In the training, attendees also learned about the state's anti-human trafficking law, Penal Code 236.1, enacted in 2005, and were given contacts and resources to help follow up cases in their jurisdictions. The seminar was the idea of Turner's lieutenant, Lt.Ty Hatfield, who wanted Turner and his partner, DetectiveDet. Setwan Johnson, to train the entire department on the issue. They are a two-man Missing Persons and Human Trafficking task force for the LBPD. Though it's just the pair of them, they are pushing several cases and hope to be the first officers in the state to have a case prosecuted under the 2005 law, Turner said. They came close with Johnson's most recent case, which resulted in guilty verdicts on all 17 felony counts and a possible sentence of well over 200 years for a pimp, though no human trafficking violation was filed, Turner said. "We have two other cases that are pending and it's not looking good for the bad guys," he predicted. The horror lingers Nonetheless, convictions can't fix girls who have been damaged both physically and emotionally, he said. "In one of our cases, the girl was damaged so bad physically that she can't walk," Turner said. "They actually brought her into a hospital in a wheelchair and she cannot walk." Turner said the girl was 16 at the time and still struggles to deal with the physical and emotional scars. She isn't the only one. "When I dealt with (her father) on the phone, he had a passion and a concern ... he had the desire to get me, whatever it took, to get me off the phone and out there in the streets looking for his daughter," Turner said. When the intense and emotional father found his daughter paralyzed in the hospital, Turner said, the detective saw a change that haunts him to this day. "When he saw the damage done to his baby, the look on his face -- it was like I was staring at a statue," Turner said. "He had no emotion, he was done." tracy.manzer@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1261.
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