Three months ago, State Trooper Jonathan Otto, 33, of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, pulled over a car that had caught his attention by traveling 104 mph long after midnight, just south of Kingman. He smelled marijuana in the car. It was driven by a man with an adult female wearing only lingerie. Their passenger was a female juvenile whose fake document showed her to be 18. She was, Otto says, “not wearing a whole lot of clothing.”
The adults had taken this 16-year-old from California to Arizona and were heading for Las Vegas. The girl gave Otto the California phone number of her grandmother, who immediately told him the girl might have been in prostitution since she was 15. Trained in interview techniques for such situations, and experienced at noticing people who somehow do not belong together, Otto correctly suspected DMST — domestic minor sex trafficking.
Trooper Mitch Jergenson, 46, stopped a car driven by a man whose passenger was a 17-year-old girl he had gotten to know via social media. He had paid for her ticket from California to Phoenix and was taking her to Las Vegas. She said she was going to be a “model,” then said she was going to work in a strip club. This, says Jergenson, is “the start of a process” whereby minors often wind up working the streets. “Las Vegas has strict regulations, but …”
Sgt. Scott Reutter, 47, who watches the motels near the Phoenix intersection of I-17 and I-10, where prostitutes are active, approached a young girl talking to an older man. She said she was 22. Reutter, whose daughters are 22 and 19, thought she was “14, maybe 15.” She had been a runaway for 17 months, since she was 13, and said that if she were returned to the custody of child services she would run again. After a 10-minute hearing, she was returned. She immediately ran, and did so repeatedly. To be in law enforcement is often to feel condemned to bailing an ocean with a thimble.
