How Dallas police, state law failed teen who was trafficked after Mavs game | Opinion
A Texas statute that treats suspected runaways as offenders is complicating searches for missing teens.
We now know what happened to the girl. Officials say she was found 10 days after the game in a hotel in Oklahoma City, where she was being sold for sex. The teen — seen on surveillance video leaving the American Airlines Center with a man — was deemed a runaway by Dallas police, who punted her case to officers in North Richland Hills, where the girl’s family lives.
The teen who disappeared at the Mavericks game had been missing once before, about a year earlier, and was found in two days. But after she disappeared on April 8, her father told police that the girl was on good terms with her family and that running away was not consistent with her mental state at the time, according to the family’s attorney.
Meanwhile, the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure requires that police investigate the whereabouts of missing children and enter them into a national database, regardless of whether it appears they were abducted or left their families voluntarily.We requested an interview with Dallas police. They sent us a statement citing the Family Code and noting that they generated a report about the girl.
North Richland Hills and Dallas police put out a bulletin on April 11 — three days after the girl’s disappearance. Almost a week after the Mavericks game, the girl’s family turned to the Houston nonprofit Texas Counter-Trafficking Initiative, which within hours found nude photos of teen online advertising her for sex in Oklahoma. The anti-trafficking group alerted Oklahoma authorities, who rescued the girl from a hotel on April 18.
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