A 35-year-old woman was charged with sexually trafficking a missing 16-year-old who had run away from home, according to the Harris County Constable of Precinct 4 in Texas.
Police said they began an investigation into a report of a runaway juvenile when they received information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
‘They begin to trust these traffickers, and once they trust them and they go with them, then they end up getting thrown onto the street or on online ads or even taken.’
The FBI said the juvenile was being trafficked out of a home in north Harris County.
Police obtained a search warrant but were unable to find the juvenile at the home. Instead they found Brandi Lowe.
“From the evidence that we got from the home, we were able to establish that the female that we took into custody was in fact doing a lot of the stuff online, trying to solicit individuals to basically sell her out as a 16-year-old child,” Constable Mark Herman said.
Herman said police were “resilient” in their efforts that night to locate the missing juvenile after Lowe’s arrest.
“We didn’t give up. We ended up getting a location of a possible hotel she was staying at. We went to the hotel, and we found her with a male subject that we felt was a part of this also,” he said.
“And she was rescued, put in a safe place,” Herman added.
Lowe was charged with promotion of prostitution of a person under 18 years old and held on a bond of $20,000.
The juvenile was reunited with her family, and police indicated that some more people may be arrested in the case as the investigation continues.
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Private investigator Betty Simons told KHOU-TV that these kinds of cases typically begin through online interactions.
“A big thing that we see is that they’re groomed online, whether that’s through Xbox, PlayStations, social medias, you know, so they’re groomed online or even in the schools,” Simons said. “They begin to trust these traffickers, and once they trust them and they go with them, then they end up getting thrown onto the street or on online ads or even taken.”
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Texas, Sex trafficking, Child trafficking, Prostitution, Crime
