A frantic phone call from a human trafficking victim in Houston to her mother in Fort Worth might have been the call that saved her life, ...
A frantic phone call from a human trafficking victim in Houston to her mother in Fort Worth might have been the call that saved her life, police said.
The 20-year-old woman, who's also from Fort Worth, moved to Houston with a friend on Dec. 21 to look for a job, according to Houston Police Department Vice Division Commander James Dale.
The pair stayed together in Houston for a few days but couldn't find any work. The holiday season might have played a role in their inability to find jobs, Dale said. The woman's friend gave up and drove back home to Fort Worth, leaving the 20-year-old alone in the country's fourth largest city.
Police say she was living alone in a hotel in the city's westside when she met Kevin Winston.
Winston, 25, walked up to the woman at the hotel pool and started talking to her. She told him that she was looking for work, and Winston seemed like a godsend when he told her he knew someone who was hiring, Dale said.
On top of the job prospect, Winston bought the woman new clothes and other items, even offering to pay her hotel bill in full. The whole time, he was grooming her to work for him as a prostitute, Dale said.
"He told her all the things she wanted to hear," Dale said.
About three days after their first meeting, Winston made his first move by asking her to become his prostitute, according to Dale. The woman resisted immediately. That's when he allegedly beat her into submission and forced her to become a prostitute, Dale said.
During one encounter with a john on Dec. 27, the woman was able to get hold of his cell phone and call her mother in Fort Worth. She told her mother that she was being forced into prostitution and being held against her will but was unable to give her an exact location. That frantic and short phone call worried her mother, who filed a missing person report with the Fort Worth Police Department immediately.
Police say the woman was almost returned home safely after a Texas police officer pulled over a vehicle she was in, but that officer actually wound up taking her off the missing person registry and sending her off. Dale declined to name the location of the traffic stop or the agency that pulled the car over.
The officer identified the woman as a passenger in the car and noticed she was listed as a missing person when he ran her identification through several databases, as most officers do during a traffic stop, Dale said.
"At the time, the officer though that everything was OK and that it wasn't a trafficking situation," Dale said.
The woman told the officer she was OK, Dale said, so the missing person report was taken down. Dale said while the traffic stop was not the brightest moment for law enforcement, he said any officer would have acted the same way.
That wasn't enough for the woman's mother, who instead went to Houston to search for her daughter on her own. For weeks, the mother went around town trying to find her, to no avail. It wasn't until 3 p.m. Tuesday that the mother called the Houston Police Department to ask for help, Dale said.
With just the phone number provided by the mother, vice detectives were able to track down the woman's photo on a website promoting her as a prostitute. That's when an undercover officer organized a meetup pretending to be a john, Dale said.
Winston and two other suspects – Martina Chambers, 20, and Mikia Collins, 19 – drove off from the hotel as the undercover officer showed up. Marked police officers were able to find the three and pulled them over, ultimately taking them into custody on a plethora of human trafficking, and prostitution-related felony charges. By the time those three were in custody, the woman had been rescued by police.
"She immediately broke down sobbing," Dale said of the moments police barged into the room. "She was extremely emotional and thankful that police officers were there. We were able to reunite her with her mom."
The timing of the sting was perfect, since the three suspects were planning on taking the woman to New York early Wednesday morning – likely to be sold to another pimp, Dale said. Winston and Chambers were both charged with felony aggravated promotion of prostitution, compelling prostitution and trafficking of a person, while Collins was charged with compelling prostitution and trafficking of a person.
Collins and Chambers appeared to be former prostitutes belonging to Winston who worked their way up in their ring, Dale said. By the time they were arrested Tuesday, Dale said the two women were engaging in active recruitment of other women to become Winston's prostitutes.
"Eventually, (these women) get beat down, manipulated, and really, kind of brainwashed by the trafficker (into doing more nefarious things)," Dale said.
The investigation is far from over. The victim told police that there might have been at least one other pimp who trafficked her and more victims just like her inside Winston's ring.
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