Whisper
#byefelicia
Gregory Lionel Foster
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news...een-child-prostitute-20140415,0,7101556.storyAn offer of a drink and snacks was all it took to lure the 14-year-old Orlando girl into a man's car. She quickly found out she had made a terrible mistake.
Less than seven hours later,
[....]
deputies rescued the terrified and confused teenager after she had been kidnapped and forced to have sex by an assailant who then tried to use her as a prostitute,
[....]
Gregory Lionel Foster, 28, of Orlando faces numerous charges, including human trafficking and kidnapping. He was among 44 people arrested in a three-day sex sting operation.
It's unacceptable," Lake Sheriff Gary Borders said
[....]
"Those people need to be in jail and we're glad to put them in jail."
Human trafficking includes commercial, for-profit sex where one person benefits while another is forced to perform acts, said Lake sheriff's Det. Amber Warren, who handled the Foster case. Warren said such cases take months to investigate and pin down. Victims usually underreport what's happening to them, she said, so the cases require a lot of rapport building for victims to trust law officers.
What happened to the 14-year-old is all too common, said Tomas Lares, who chairs the Greater Orlando Human Trafficking Task Force. Lares said human traffickers take the time necessary to "groom" victims by getting to know them, calling them beautiful and developing "dysfunctional" relationships. Traffickers target vulnerable victims with low self-esteem who are easily manipulated, he said. Although his group doesn't yet have firm statistics on trafficking of minors, Lares said it seems as if "the demand is growing to have sex with children."
[...]
But awareness about human trafficking in Florida is growing, with reports "skyrocketing," he said. For example, the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation last year fielded 126 human-trafficking tips, twice as many as in 2012. The joint-agency task force handles, among other things, prostitution and illegal-adult-entertainment investigations. Florida ranks third nationally for its volume of calls to the National Human Trafficking Resource Center hotline, with nearly 1,200 reports last year.
In the case involving the 14-year-old, she and Foster had connected on Facebook, Warren said. He saw her at a gas station about 7 p.m.
[....]
bought her a drink and snacks and offered her a ride home. But Warren saidFoster had no intention of taking her there.
Within hours, Foster twice tried to force the girl he called a "baby" to have sex with other people against her will — all before her mother realized the teen had left home. The girl was scared and tried to run away before Foster took her to an Orlando motel and had sex with her,
[...]
Then, responding to an Internet ad for sex hookups, Foster took her to a Clermont hotel. He planned to force the girl to have sex with a stranger for $270,
[....]
a price that included $50 in gas money. Fortunately for her, that turned out to be where Lake detectives were running the prostitution sting.
The girl had spoken twice on the phone with a detective posing as a customer to arrange for sex. When the girl and Foster arrived at the scheduled meeting place, law officers saw them arguing. She entered the hotel in tears and confused but was relieved when she encountered law officers about 1:30 a.m. Thursday. Warren said the girl asked if she was in trouble and wanted to call her mother.
In tears, the teen described to Lake detectives how she continually asked Foster to let her go home, but he refused. The assailant had told the teen she was not to "mess up this time" during the Clermont encounter.
Foster — who has a lengthy rap sheet including drug and armed-burglary arrests — was placed under arrest on felony and other charges in Lake. Orlando police added a count of lewd and lascivious battery in the case.
[...]
the teen's dramatic rescue as "fate."
"I really think we saved her life," Warren said. "This was the first time she had been prostituted."