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Saving Bobbi:
A teen’s sex trafficking ordeal
listening to a booking interview between Sgt. Grant Snyder and one
of the men who
Story by Pam Louwagie
Photography by Elizabeth Flores
Bobbi Larson, left, and a friend paused for a smoking break in
Opening the door, he paused to let his eyes adjust from the
bright light of the summer day outside before he could see her. The girl was
huddled with a friend on a grimy mattress on the floor, lolling in a
methamphetamine haze.
Instruments of modern-day bondage lay scattered about: A drug
pipe keeping her in a meth-induced stupor, willing to do almost anything for
the next high. A prepaid credit card. Three cellphones, tethering the girls to
pimps and johns 24/7.
Dressed up in white lingerie and thick eye shadow, Bobbi Larson
was just 17 and a long way from home.
“What’s going on?” she yelled when she heard people in the hall
of the Minneapolis bungalow.
Then a man about her dad’s age walked in, shirt untucked over
faded blue jeans, head shaved bald, a stubble of beard on his face. There was
nothing unusual about that. Bobbi had learned to expect all kinds of men to
show up. Rich professionals and blue-collar johns. Men from rough parts of town
and those who drove in from posh suburbs, buying sex with girls as young as
their own daughters.
He was careful about the tone of voice he used, aiming for
compassion. “I’m Sgt. Snyder,
Bobbi hated cops. They could disrupt her ability to get meth and
haul her back into treatment.
“We’re fine,” she snapped. “What do you want?”
Grant Snyder knew they were not fine. In 16 years of police
work, he had seen too much of the ugly world of underground online sex markets,
where girls from all across
Pimps liked to target the particularly vulnerable ones — kids
with abuse in their past, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome. When those challenges
combined with teenage rebellion, and kids bolted from home to the streets, they
were easy prey.
How is child sex
trafficking different from prostitution? In the past,
juveniles who were sold for sex were arrested and prosecuted as prostitutes.
But in recent years, federal and some state laws have changed to define
children as victims rather than criminals. Federal law now defines child sex
trafficking as the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or
obtaining of a person for a commercial sex act, if the person is under 18 years
of age, regardless of whether any form of coercion is involved.Minnesota law
also defines 18 as the upper age limit of what is considered child sex
trafficking and regards those being trafficked as victims of a crime rather
than perpetrators.Source: U.S. Department of Justice
Snyder was fed up with the number of kids being snagged by these
pimps, used by the johns. He had ceased to view prostitution as harmless. To
him, these kids and even adults trapped in the sex trade were victims pure and
simple. They desperately needed help whether they knew it or not.
He had joined an unusual collection of Minnesotans —
prosecutors, Catholic sisters, a billionaire hotel company executive, formerly
prostituted women, advocates, truckers and cops — who were changing the way
prostituted children are treated in the state. In 2011, they successfully
pushed for a new state law defining those under 16 as victims rather than
criminals. Their efforts had put
The moves to decriminalize and help prostituted children came
with a change of language to describe what was happening to them: “Sex
trafficking” began to replace “prostitution” even when children were not
transported across state or national borders. “Victim” supplanted “prostitute.”
Soon a push began that would raise the age of those regarded as
victims to 18 and secure money for programs to help girls escape their
predators for good. Some likened the effort to the transformation back in the
1970s in how society viewed domestic abuse, when the first battered women’s
shelters opened.
But on this day, in the midst of those broader efforts, Snyder
simply needed to get Bobbi and her friend out of that house.
Rooms like the one where Bobbi had ended up in north Minneapolis
exist all across the state, police and prosecutors say — in good neighborhoods
and bad, in urban areas, suburbs and small towns. The juvenile sex trade
respects no boundaries of geography, class, culture, gender or race.
Bobbi hopes that sharing her story and the horrors of what it
meant to be trafficked will save other girls from that fate in
Scott and Deanna Larson, the couple who raised her and whom she
regards as her mom and dad, are actually Bobbi’s uncle and aunt. They live
nearly 200 miles to the north along
How had she ended up in this dismal room, so far away?
A
cop and a sex-trafficking victim form an unlikely bond: As Minneapolis
Police Sgt. Grant Snyder worked to extricate Bobbi Larson from her reliance on
drugs and her vulnerability to sex traffickers, she grew to trust him. He saw
hope in her that, with help, she could move on with her life.
Her parents could only guess. Their beautiful little girl, the
one who had been a Girl Scout, a basketball player and a decent student, had
gotten in with the wrong friends as a young teen and started experimenting with
drugs and who knows what else. She had slipped loose from their best attempts
to safeguard her with drug treatment and group homes.
But they never dreamed that their small-town girl might get
involved in sex trafficking. When a Sgt. Snyder from the Minneapolis Police
Department called to say he thought he had located their daughter, who had been
missing for two weeks, and briefed them on what was happening, they were stunned.
Snyder was not. He knew it happened more often than most people
could fathom. Though many Americans think of child sex trafficking as a global
scourge of the developing world, advocates warn it is an insidious domestic
problem, too.
Unlike the past, when pimps paraded girls and women on street
corners, sex trafficking in the digital age flourishes almost invisibly online.
In just one 72-hour sting over the summer, an FBI-led
operation rescued 105 children and netted 152 pimps in 76 cities
nationwide, including four alleged pimps in the Twin Cities.
The true scope of the problem is elusive. Reliable statistics do
not exist, and estimates on the number of underage trafficking victims range
from 1,400 to 2.4 million, according to a September report from the
In the absence of hard numbers, some say estimates are
overblown.
In 2010, the Women’s Funding Network, an advocacy group, commissioned
research on how many underage girls were being trafficked in three states,
including
Whatever the precise extent of sex trafficking in
Now, towering over Bobbi and her friend in the meth-infused
room, he calmly told them, “You guys are going to have to come with us.”
He leaned down and stretched out his arm to help them up.
A North Woods childhood
Everyone’s life is a stew of good and bad luck. For Bobbi, luck
arrived in extremes.
A doctor and therapists would later conclude that before she was
even born, alcohol had washed from her birth mother’s blood, through the
placenta and into her tiny forming brain.
There, it may have signaled genes to make too much or too little
of certain chemicals. It may have tricked some cells into self-destructing
sooner than they would have in a healthy developing brain.
Bobbi’s birth mother insists she didn’t drink alcohol during
pregnancy and didn’t develop problems with alcohol until her daughter was 6
months old.
It is estimated that each year in
Bobbi’s birth parents, struggling with their own addictions,
initially attempted to raise her along with her two older brothers. They lived
in a subsidized house near the North Woods town of
That environment also could have affected Bobbi’s young brain.
Babies raised in harsh circumstances, where the world proves untrustworthy,
develop differently, research shows. They find ways to alleviate stress
quickly, not worrying about the future. Studies show they end up with greater
chances of substance abuse, teen pregnancy, employment difficulties and
decreased cognitive ability.
But at age 2, Bobbi’s luck swung dramatically the other way.
Scott and Deanna Larson decided they should become legal
guardians for their niece and nephews, even though they were already busy with
11- and 14-year-old daughters of their own. Deanna worked as a dental hygienist
in
On a cold winter Sunday in 1997, Bobbi was delivered to the
Larsons’ front door in Two Harbors. Scott was sitting in a recliner watching
football on TV and remembers Bobbi toddling straight over to him, her blue eyes
sparkling under wisps of blonde hair. She smiled and climbed right up onto his
lap.
They read a book together that evening. Right away, Scott
understood his new daughter craved affection.
The Larsons treated Bobbi and her brothers like their own
children. All three later took their last name and called them “Mom” and “Dad.”
Scott and Deanna would pack everyone into the family Suburban to
go fishing at nearby ponds, to worship at the Lutheran church and to watch high
school hockey, volleyball and basketball games. The cheerleaders let Bobbi use
their pompons.
Bobbi was a bubbly child, her loud voice and wide smile
attracting other kids. In grade school, she earned several perfect attendance
pins. She rode snowmobiles and four-wheelers, made up new games and taught her
classmates the latest dances. She went out of her way to make her friends
happy, bringing one a favorite Pop-Tarts snack every day at school.
She had a sweet, sensitive side. When the Larsons’ oldest
daughter gave birth to a son, Scott watched 11-year-old Bobbi cradle, feed and
diaper the baby with a tender, maternal touch. The older daughters were in
nursing careers, and Bobbi thought she might want to do that someday, too.
Hannah Broadbent, a close childhood friend, recalls Bobbi confiding
to her the pain of feeling abandoned by her birth parents.
Several times a day, Bobbi told Scott and Deanna “love you,”
then waited to hear them say it back.
They always did.
Signs of trouble
Bobbi’s teachers at Minnehaha Elementary were the first to sound
an alarm.
At conferences in the flat, brick school building two blocks
from tourists whirring by along
Doctors diagnosed Bobbi with attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder and put her on medication. At age 12, specialists diagnosed her with
fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, marking it in her medical records as a
“permanent diagnosis” requiring long-term support. Bobbi would need additional
time for complex tasks and her family would need to be aware of her “expressive
difficulties,” the document said.
All of that could translate into Bobbi having more trouble than
the average kid making good decisions, anticipating consequences, controlling
impulses or learning from experience. It also meant she might be outgoing,
hungry for even negative attention, trusting, randomly attracted to strangers
and vulnerable to manipulation — a dangerous mix heading into adolescence.
The timing was tough for Scott and Deanna. Their older daughters
were finding their way as young adults. Scott and Deanna were working long days
trying to turn a profit at the bar and grill they had just bought.
But the medical predictions kept coming true. As a young teen,
Bobbi started getting suspended from school for fighting and smoking
cigarettes. Her friend Hannah saw that while Bobbi was influential among her
peers, she looked up to and was easily influenced by older friends.
She would brush on dramatic eye shadow and fix her hair, then
pop out the screen of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and take
off for the breakwater wall, a long concrete bulwark jutting out into the cold,
choppy water of Lake Superior. There, she would sit near a small lighthouse
with guys 18 and 19 years old, drink cheap liquor and smoke a low-grade form of
marijuana they called ditch weed. She started experimenting with sex.
It wasn’t unheard-of behavior for a teen on the
Hannah saw Bobbi turn into a different person when she was high;
she could be mean.
Scott and Deanna worried that their daughter was headed for
disaster. Scott would sit in their darkened house trying to catch Bobbi’s
friends picking her up at her window. If she didn’t make curfew, he would get
in his car to track her down.
He and Deanna explained repeatedly that running around was
dangerous, but Bobbi didn’t seem to understand. The fun was too alluring.
Bobbi pushed them too far over the Fourth of July in 2009, when
they learned she wasn’t hanging out with the friends she said she would be
with. Once again, Scott found her and pulled her out of a car that she had been
riding in drunk with older boys.
Scott and Deanna decided Bobbi needed more help than they could give
her and made a desperate decision to send her away to treatment. She was 14.
Learning to escape
Scott and Deanna were involved in decisions about where she
would go, but because of their status as legal guardians,
During the treatment programs, in groups and one-on-one,
counselors tried to help Bobbi figure out why she was drawn to using drugs.
They guided her in identifying triggers for her urge to get high and in coming
up with responsible choices to make instead.
At every turn, Scott and Deanna dutifully drove to visit her and
participate in parent meetings, sometimes making three-hour trips to the
“All of this stuff was all about wanting her to be able to go on
to leading a successful life,” Scott said.
They were heartened when Bobbi completed several treatments
successfully. She was good at convincing the counselors that her addictions
were under control. Later on, she would admit it was acting.
“I was just like, ‘OK, I can just use when I get out. Whatever.
I’ll just do [the treatment],’ ” she said. “I’m a very good manipulator, and
it’s sad to admit, but I am.”
She also became adept at simply running away. Security at
adolescent treatment centers and group homes varies widely. Only three centers
in
Kids in such places are usually stripped of electronic devices
that would give them access to the Internet. But in early 2012 — more than two
years into her cycle of treatments — Bobbi snuck an iPod Touch into Little Sand
Group Home in the northern
A new friend from treatment plotted with Bobbi how they would
run away. They posted a message on a dating website seeking a ride to the Twin
Cities. A stranger responded and they made plans for him to pick them up. They
were out of the building and into the car in moments.
The friend told Bobbi she knew of an empty house on
They did their best to clean up the large living room, sweeping
the wood floor and washing it with disinfecting wipes stolen from the Holiday
convenience store a couple of blocks away. They tacked old sheets to the walls
to section it off and moved a box spring and mattress onto the floor. They
wrapped their clean clothes over left-behind pillows before daring to sleep on
them.
For nearly a month they sank into a drug-induced fog, sleeping
until the afternoon, then walking to the gas station to use the bathroom and
sometimes steal food before returning to the house to plug in their hair
straighteners and put on makeup.
Bobbi said her friend showed her how to get money. They walked
toward downtown
Bobbi’s friend taught her to make sure to ask for the money
before having sex and to use condoms.
Later, Bobbi would tell police that she didn’t want to do it,
but she also didn’t want to look weak. She was hungry and desperately wanted a
shower — something she could get if she went with men to hotel rooms or their
homes.
As the girls were drawn into selling sex in the winter of 2012,
the Women’s Foundation of Minnesota had decided to make combatting child sex
trafficking a major initiative of the organization. It launched a $5 million,
five-year campaign, giving grants to groups fighting trafficking and working
with victims, funding research and spreading the word that “Minnesota Girls Are
Not For Sale.”
Men already were buying Bobbi.
“Every time after I turned a trick, I felt disgusting,” Bobbi
said later. “You know, I felt like, even after I showered, I was, like, ick.”
The money bought them drugs and alcohol, clothes, makeup and
manicures. Bobbi met up with members of the Gangster Disciples gang. She agreed
to let her friend dip a needle in ink to draw a homemade tattoo of a dollar
sign on her chest. It would prove, she thought, that she was worth something.
More than three weeks after they ran away, authorities found
Bobbi and a friend swimming in a hotel pool in downtown
But by then, Bobbi had developed a dangerous new taste for life
on the run.
Click to Part 2: Lured by
drugs, used by pimps
Click to Part 3: One
cop's determination