girls who took life for granted, and i wasn t that kind of person, you know? i dressed respectably. i never showed my body off. ever. but this florida teenager s life took a terrifying turn when she was trafficked by an unlikely criminal, a fellow 16-year-old girl. i was such a trusting teenager. like i thought that everybody liked me and everybody wanted to be my friend and nobody would hurt me. 200,000 to 300,000 of our children are at risk of it every year, our children, united states citizens. brad dennis runs rescue and recovery for klaas kids, the national organization dedicated to saving missing children. he says shauna s case shows the alarming growth of the disappearance of american kids, an estimated 300,000 forced into prostitution in the u.s. each year. it s happening in every major town, every little suburban area, every rural area. it s happening all over the united states. it happened when shauna began
he said, i want that girl to come down. shauna, come down. it looked just like shauna. the girl come down and it wasn t shauna. it was a girl on crutches. but shauna had been there. at fist he didn t want to tell us that until my husband got violent with him. the girl started screaming, just tell him, just tell him. under threat of violence the man admitted he had seen shauna but refused to say any more. while her parents searched on foot, shauna s older brother alerted friends who wokked for the local search and rescue team. that call reached brad dennis of klaas kids. the best thing you can do is begin talking to the family and talking with them about it all and call her friends and try to find out who this young girl is and what is she really all about. while friends and family searched the area, brad dennis
days of sexual abuse. we found out that she had gonorrhea in her throat. she had chlamydia and was severely, severely, severely torn and ripped down below. that s when they found out they used different things on her. the hospital declined to comment due to federal privacy laws. they expected me to be alone with a male investigator in an interrogation room. i couldn t do that. i couldn t even be alone with my dad. they should understand that. if i can t be alone with my dad or my brothers, what makes you think i can be alone with a man i ve never met in my whole life? in the two years since the abduction no one has been arrested or prosecuted for the kidnapping, gang rape and torture of shauna newell. the escambia county sheriff s department declined msnbc s request for comment, but said that shaw ma and her family had been uncooperative in the investigation.
call this in. real quick like my husband copied it. even though it was nearly midnight, shauna s family mobilized their own search by following that phone number which led them to an abandoned construction site. there s nobody there. so my husband hangs up and he calls the man back, where do you live? the man gives us a different address. my husband keeps him on the phone to make sure he ain t lying to us. we pull up and it s an old man. he is probably like 80 years old. my husband gets out and said do you know shauna and [ bleep ]. he s like, yeah she s my granddaughter. at midnight she get an address from kathy s grandfather and race to a strange house where shauna s stepdad thinks he sees her in an upstairs window. they open the door with a chain on. he said, do you know shauna? yeah. get out of here. i don t want no trouble from her. my husband said, guess what? now you got it, buddy. he busted the door down.
an innocent friendship with a new girl junior year in high school. it was a girl i went to school with. i met her through ged classes and she was a really good friend. shauna says that girl, a 16-year-old wheel call cathy worked hard to gain shauna s trust and within months a deep friendship was born. we would always talk in class. i would always tell her, me and my mom are arguing again, of course. it was my gut instinct as a mother to keep shauna away from her. shauna s mother lisa said from the start, her daughter s fast friendship with kathy made her uneasy. when i first met her at school when i picked shauna up, she came out to the car and shauna got in the car, and told her to stay way from her. i was like, my parents aren t controlling, you can come over to my house and we can do whatever we want to do. you want to go out and drink, we can go out and drink.