When we hear about human trafficking, it often can feel distant, like a crime so dark or so traumatic, it could only be happening in far off places or major cities.

But the gut wrenching reality is that it’s happening everywhere, including right here in West Michigan.

Today, we talk to a local survivor, and law enforcement, working at prevention and keeping community safe.

Alright, so it’s Chris Goehring.

I’m a detective with the Kent County Sheriff’s Department.

And I’m also a task force officer with the FBI’s West Michigan based child exploitation and Human Trafficking Task Force.

You’ve been looking at and dealing with things happening right here in Kent County, right here in West Michigan.

What does the human/sex trafficking problem look like in West Michigan?

It is an issue that everybody kind of knows about.

You know, they hear about it on the news, and they see it on the movies.

And that’s kind of where they get their 10,000 foot view of what kind of trafficking is.

When I started the task force back in 2021, or 22, I had no idea how bad the issue actually is, until we started really digging into it, and seeing that it’s everywhere in Kent County, in the suburbs, into the rural areas, in homes, in hotels.

It’s everywhere.

The problem of human trafficking and sex trafficking specifically is a huge issue in Kent County.

And that’s one of the first questions that I get asked when people find out what I do for a living, and what I investigate is, yeah, we know about human trafficking, but it doesn’t really happen here, right?

It doesn’t happen in Kent County.

It doesn’t happen in Michigan.

It’s somewhere else where it takes place, but... It is definitely happening in Kent County, in Michigan, in Grand Rapids, Cascade.

There’s no area that is not affecting.

If you walk away from this thinking that it doesn’t impact you, you’re lying to yourself.

It’s here.

It’s happening here.

And don’t think because you live on the outskirts, you know, um, you live in gated communities.

They don’t care.

They will get at your children wherever they are.

I was trafficked here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the age of 15.

I was a 15 year old runaway.

Um, dysfunctional home.

And, uh, one day I was, um, walking down the street, and I was crying.

I can’t remember for what, but I remember I was crying.

And the guy pulled up to me, and asked me why I was crying, and I shouldn’t be out here, and how dangerous it is, and on and on, and he was like, can he take me out to eat?

So we can talk.

And I looked in the car, and I didn’t feel no red lights going off, so I was like, yeah.

So he took me out to eat, and I’m still bawling, and he’s asking me questions about my family, and I’m answering them, you know?

Um, my mom, my dad, and at that time, I had a little boy, and my sister and my brother dropped me off, and every day, he would pick me up, and take me out to eat, then start buying me clothes, and still, and then start taking me out to different bars, and telling me how much he loved me, and then he was like, you know... If your mom hadn’t have did this, if your dad hadn’t have did this, this wouldn’t happen, that wouldn’t happen, but I’m going to protect you, I’ll never let nobody hurt you, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that time, I had a lot of issues.

I had daddy issues.

I had rejection issues.

I just had a bunch of issues that I didn’t know of.

So, we started going out to the bars, and then one day, after the bar closed, we went to one of his friends’ house, like we usually do.

Nothing out of the ordinary.

But this time, when I came to, his friend was on top of me having sex with me any way he wanted to, and I’m looking for the person who said, you know, he loves me and nobody would ever hurt me.

And he looked like the devil himself.

And he told me to get his money.

I was only 15.

And I remember crying, just crying.

I wanted my mom.

I wanted to go home, but my life, as I knew it then, at the age of 15, was over.

He took me to, when the act was done, he grabbed me by my hair, threw me in the car, took me around the corner to this house, um, which is called a stable, ’cause when I went in there, there was more women in there, and I was the youngest.

And it was an older lady in there, they gave me a valium and something to drink.

Um, and I’m still crying, and I was told, If you run, if you tell the police, we’re gonna kill your mother, your son, your brother, and your sister, and we’re gonna cut your body parts up and spread them all over Michigan, they’ll never find you.

So at the age of 15, here in Grand Rapids.

I was taken out on South Division.

And started the life of prostitution.

Most trafficking victims have some sort of a vulnerability.

So a trafficker is a problem solver.

So you have a female that’s homeless, that’s living off the streets.

She has nowhere to live, she has no income, she can’t get anything, any housing.

So that comes along this trafficker.

And he says, hey, and creates this relationship, I’ll give you a place to stay.

So is the trafficker’s ultimate goal just to make money, or is it relationship money, or just typically just to abuse and make money?

Has nothing to do with the relationship, has everything to do with money.

This is a huge money maker for them.

As we see statistics all the time, and one I read globally, human trafficking is $150 billion a year industry, tax free, $150 billion a year.

If you look at, like, the back in the day, when we think of human trafficking, we think of the old prostitute pimp on the street corner.

Does that still happen?

Absolutely.

It happens.

We see it all the time.

But you look at what a trafficker could make from a girl, when I read this statistic, I was shocked, but it’s true.

Um, like a typical prostitute on the street corner and a pimp, that girl will make him about $250,000 a year.

Right.

So now, with technology and the advancements, that trafficker can take that same person and evolve the techniques and make twice, if not three times that amount on one person, either boy or girl, adult, or juvenile.

So that’s the drive, is the money.

A lot of the trends that we’re seeing now, it’s all happening on social media.

It’s happening in the cell phone.

It’s just a 6 inch screen that we think is harmless and isn’t going to hurt our kids when we give it to them because it’s a way for us to communicate.

But there’s a whole other beast to that.

And that beast is the internet.

Anytime you give your child access to the internet, you’re giving your child access to online pedophiles and human traffickers.

Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it.

They’re using it.

These predators and these traffickers are creating online personas, and they’re coming into these arenas, and they’re communicating with our kids.

Our kids don’t realize they’re talking to a grown adult who has an alternative motive to get to that kid.

And that’s where that grooming starts.

It’s very slow.

It takes sometimes years, because what they do is they desensitize them, especially to sex.

So it might be, like, start off as, oh, hey, I think your name is cute, or I think you’re cute, if a picture’s sent.

And they start slowly having that online relationship into where our kids want to have that relationship because they’re filling a void of vulnerability sometimes, if you will.

It’s all in the mind.

Once a person gets to mind, the body will follow.

So they’re online, they’re befriending these children, um, find them about their family, just finding everything about these kids.

And then once they become their best friend, they manipulate the situation.

And the child might be... say, I can’t go outside, so now I’m mad at my mom.

Or I’m on punishment for not having good grades.

And they will tell this person that they’re mad and why they’re mad.

But this person is acting like they’re, the same age as the young child.

And next thing you know, you look up, and your child is gone.

You know, they walked away, they done walked and met this person at the park or, uh, met them the mall, met them somewhere.

And then go off with them.

And a lot of times, once they go off, that’s force, fraud, or coercion, And the child can’t come back.

So now that we lost a child.

The days of the kid getting ripped off the corner.

I mean, that’s what we think of trafficking, right?

Like, some kids sitting on the street corner, and the white van pulls up, and the kid gets pulled into it.

That does happen, but we’re seeing more of the kids instead of being ripped off the street.

They’re walking out of the house, and they’re getting in the car by themselves because they want to be there, because there’s a whole back end of this online grooming that took place over years.

And then they slowly move them into the sex trafficking from that.

What did they think, a relationship most of the time?

Exactly.

You know, they have a term for it.

The old days was the gorilla pimp, the guy, the guy that was the trafficker that would use force to control his girls, or his guys, because it’s girls and guys.

And then there’s the Romeo Pimp.

The Romeo Pimp is the one that has them think that they’re in love, that they’re in a relationship with each other.

It has nothing to do with love or the relationship.

It’s about the money.

But they are so brainwashed about, you know, you can only do this for me, and we’re in this together, so never cross me, never talk to cops, ’cause cops are evil.

Not realizing that we’re here to help.

We want to help out the victims and stop the trafficking in any way we can.

We had a case in Grand Rapids just a few years ago of this exact case.

As a 16 year old, she was in the foster care system.

She lost her parents, both of them to drug addiction.

And eventually, she was taken a ward of the state.

She was put up in foster care, where she was abused by her first foster care family, and then her second.

And then she had enough.

And so she ran away.

So she made it from the UP all the way down to Flint, and eventually over to Grand Rapids.

She went back to the streets.

She was picked up in the park.

She met her trafficker in the park.

And then he found out her story, that she was homeless.

She had nobody.

She was living off the streets.

So he put her in a hotel, and he took care of her.

He took care of her for two weeks.

And then after that two weeks, she needed to come back every day.

When he came and picked her up, she better have 200 bucks.

I don’t care how you get $200, but you’re gonna get $200.

And so, he kind of groomed her into trafficking showed her how she could make posts online and sell herself online, because all she wanted to do was make that 200 bucks, because it’s the devil you know.

Being homeless was worse than having sex with guys.

Being homeless was worse and not having any food, then random guys off the streets just doing whatever they wanted to do to her.

And she would rather do that than be homeless.

And so fortunately for her, when she was about 15 minutes away from her first sex date, we pulled up and we were able to rescue her.

And we pushed her to a safe house.

I was investigating the trafficker, trying to build my case up, and it was a Saturday morning, 8 o’clock in the morning, and I found out he was where she was at.

We were able to take him into custody.

But at that time, she was so in love with him.

She was crying for him.

She wanted him so badly.

How does it go from this innocent kid to being controlled and being trafficked?

Because it’s the vulnerability.

They need to get out of the situation that they’re in, and this person, either guy or girl, is filling those voids, and filling those vulnerabilities, and they’ll do whatever they can to have those filled.

So it could either be homelessness, it could be alcoholism, drug use, and sometimes a parent.

If the child doesn’t have a dad in the home, and this person’s a father figure, they’ll fill that void, or same thing with a mother.

There’s no mother involved, maybe, because we’ve had female traffickers, they’ll do the same thing.

They’ll fill that void, and then that’s how they get into it, because they don’t never want to go back to that life.

I was in a life over 20 years.

20 years.

So 35, you then were able to break away so, how did you get out?

When I finally got away from him when he went to prison, I continued in the life, because how can I do something different if I don’t know how?

It’s not because when I was trafficked, I was selling my body.

When I got away from my pimp, I continued to sell my body, ’cause I didn’t know how to do anything different, and once again, how can you do something different if you don’t know how?

Secondly, I didn’t wake up one day and say, guess what?

I’m gonna be a prostitute.

Somebody taught me how to do that.

Somebody forced me to do that.

And just because I got away from him, I continued in it, in my fear of the outside world.

You know, my whole world was wrapped around the, my pimp and that culture.

So that culture became embedded in me.

July 4th of 2000.

I had had enough, I was tired.

I was tired of being called a names, and I was tired of in and out of jails and institutions.

I was just tired.

I just wanted to go to sleep.

And never wake up, and the pain would be gone.

July 4 of 2000, I tried to commit suicide, but God would just not let me die.

I just couldn’t die.

And I called my mom.

And they hadn’t heard from me, and God knows how long they had posters thinking I was dead.

Um, she came and got me.

She took me home, let me eat, sleep, and bathe.

And when I woke up, I started calling rehabs and put myself into a rehab.

I did it on my own.

I wasn’t made to do it.

I did it on my own.

And I’ve been and out of rehabs all my life, but this last time, when I put myself in there, and I was tired, here I am.

And from that, you said you turned your passion, your pain into your passion, because today, you help others who have been victimized such as yourself.

Yes.

Tell us about Sacred Beginnings.

Sacred Beginnings started, um, it really started in 2003.

I, um, at that time, they had a prostitution round table.

And I was advocating and talking at the round table and just going around Grand Rapids, you know, just talking to the women.

And next thing you know, I get, um, I get a, a card from the Grand Rapids Police Department.

They want to talk to me, and I’m just like, I’m not gonna talk to the police officers.

And then Lieutenant Ralph Mason.

He asked me to come down and talk.

And I did.

I was hired by the Grand Rapids Police Department, SWAP, social work, and police partnership.

Working with the same women.

We had the same pimp, the... we got high together, going right back on them streets, working with them same women.

How did that feel?

How did you maneuver that?

It just did my heart good to look where I was at.

Look how far I’ve come.

And I know if I can do it.

You can do it, too.

So, for me, it was like, I had to work on that little girl.

I had to go back and work on little Leslie, you know?

And... I had to do a lot of forgiving.

I had to forgive people who hurt me.

Now, that was the hardest part.

And once I started doing that, I was able to set myself free.

So I’m working with the women, and, um... I’m noticing once I’m done working with them, they have no place to go.

And when you don’t have a place to go, we go back to what we know.

And... it’s weird, because I was like, okay, I’m gonna get me a house, and I went to get a house, and didn’t think I can get it.

And all of a sudden, the people who sold the house, paid the, they paid the... the down payment, and I opened my house, and it was my own little house, and da, da, da, da.

Then I got a call one night, from a young lady, and she was like, Miss Leslie, if you don’t come get me, I’m finna step in front of this bus and kill myself.

And I’m thinking, where am I gonna take her?

What am I gonna do?

And it was like I heard God clear as day, like, right here.

And I’m like, my house?

God was like this ain’t your house.

That was the beginning of Sacred Beginnings.

I went and got her, and then here comes some more, and here comes some more.

And I didn’t know what I was doing.

You know, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew this is what I needed to do.

And that’s how Sacred Beginnings started.

And I named it Sacred Beginnings, because sacred July 4th was just between me and God.

Beginnings, every day, that we open our eyes is a chance for a new beginning.

So that’s why I named it Sacred Beginnings.

What are the signs and symptoms?

So if parents are concerned, if relatives are concerned, or just anyone that might be concerned about a coworker or friend?

What are some of the signs that people should look for in a victim of trafficking?

Behavioral changes.

Is your child acting up in any way?

Are they getting things that they usually don’t have money for?

Are they getting new iPhones?

Do they have them, or whatever phone?

Are they getting multiple phones?

Are they running away and having conversations away from you?

And again, it seems like normal teenage behavior, but watch it.

On the adult side of it, a little bit harder to detect because... it can be gradual.

It can be something that has been going on over a long period of time.

It’s not always like what you see in the TV where, you know, you got the padlock on the door, and they’re, you know, beating them down, and throw them... They don’t do that in public.

They try to hide it as much as they can.

So that’s what makes it difficult to find and investigate.

But, I guess, to the public, if anybody sees anything or thinks they’re suspicious of it, always call, because at the end of it, at the end of all this, that’s a human being, that’s a life that is being victimized.

And if it’s good or if it’s bad, if something’s happening, or if it’s not, we want to know, because we want to find out, because we don’t want that to happen to them.

Everybody deserves a good life.

Nobody deserves to be trafficked.

I see a lot of awareness.

I see a lot of progress.

Especially with a lot of our law enforcement.

Um, especially Michigan State Police, um, the Kent County Sheriff’s Department.

They’re starting to be more involved, and they’re starting to listen to more to survivors.

You know, we have lived in a life that, it’s not in a textbook.

You know, you can’t find it in a textbook.

So the collaboration between survivors, law enforcement, survivors, and different disciplines.

It’s coming together now.

So it’s making it a strong force.

Yeah, we’re making some good ground on it.

We’re learning, again, trafficking is an evolving crime.

They use different technologies, so as technology gets better, the trafficking gets better.

But we have a great group of investigators that are tech savvy, that know the game, and know how it’s being done, and it’s, we’re making ground.

When I first started this, I set a self goal that I wanted to rescue one girl, one victim, that’s all I wanted to rescue, and then I would be satisfied because I did it.

And I’ve rescued four now, in the last couple years, and a couple of them, I’ve never met.

They don’t know me.

They don’t know me from anybody on the street.

But they were saved because of the work that I did.

And looking at them have a normal life, the 16 year old that I was talking about, she has a normal life now.

She’s never met me.

I’ve never even talked to her.

And, to see her be able to have that, and knowing that the guy that did that to her can never do that to anybody else, that reward gets rid of all the negative stuff that you have to go through to get to that point.

So when the days are dark, you think about those people, you know what you’ve done to help them out, and then it just lifts you back up.

But it makes it easier to shed the negativity and the darkness, because you know you can get to that point.

And that’s what gets me through it.

I am making the dent that I can make in this huge problem.

We all have just a period of time that we’re here and able to do the things that we’re doing, and I am doing the best I can to get it all done, and we’re being successful.

And to take my past pain and to turn it around to help others so they don’t have to go through what I’ve been through.

I can’t do nothing but thank God.

I can’t do nothing, but thank God.

Thanks for watching.

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