Elijah Rising
Elijah Rising
News React: Teacher Turned Trafficker? - Red Flags of Human Trafficking - Ep. 79
Teen trafficking is closer to home than you think, and it's happening in our schools. Join us as we unravel the shocking story of a Klein ISD teacher allegedly leading a network exploiting runaway teens for prostitution. We break down the disturbing timeline revealing the tactics traffickers use to manipulate vulnerable youth. From street names to social media grooming, learn the red flags that can save lives.
Our discussion highlights the critical role of education and awareness in fighting human trafficking, urging schools and communities to stay vigilant. Tune in to understand how you can make a difference and protect at-risk youth.
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Hey guys, welcome to this new edition of our podcast. We're going to be breaking down some news stories where trafficking is involved, and this one is really shocking to me. I have my colleague Dawn right here. She does our intervention, does our awareness, and I felt like we should ask you to do this episode because you used to be a teacher and in this specific story we have a teacher who was allegedly trafficking children and exploiting runaway teens, youth, trafficking them in hotels and even out on Bissonnette Street where we used to do intervention and outreach. And so we were at a church this past Sunday and my wife, Micah, shared about this case and there was this huge gasp and people didn't know, didn't know the story, and this happened in Klein, so the spring area, right where you know I do a lot of. I live right by Klein, so this is right in our backyard. This is a classic case of trafficking that actually began well, at least what we know, it began in 2022.
Speaker 1:And it's not until 2024, just a couple of months ago that this story really broke open and the teacher was arrested. But there was just so many balls dropped, so many red flags that were going up that should have been seen, these kids should have got help, and so we want to do this video to help highlight to you, to educate you on the red flags of trafficking, what trafficking looks like, how to spot it, and so we're just going to dive right in. I'm going to read this is a story from click to houston, and the title is client isd employee alerted school of sex trafficking a year before cosmetology teachers arrest. And they do a good job of breaking down the story in the timeline. So, uh, it appears that this teacher recruited troubled juveniles from this local high school by offering them a place to stay, which would be a hotel. So let's go. I'm just going to move down to the first part in the timeline November 8th, 2022. This is when this, this story starts.
Speaker 1:A 15 year old calls for help saying she's being sex trafficked by a man and, according to court records, a deputy goes to a hotel in North Harris County to investigate. The teen tells the deputy she is being forced to prostitute by Grigsby's son, roger McGee. So Grigsby is the teacher she had, a son that was also involved in this scheme. Moments later, a harris county human trafficking investigator arrives at the hotel to interview the teen. During the interview, the teen tells the detective that she is 16 year old and an 18 year old woman are all engaged in prostitution for McGee. The court documents state the 15-year-old says McGee gave them all nicknames so the Johns would not know their names. This is the first red flag, right? So, dawn, you do a lot of street outreach. How common is it for someone to not use their real name?
Speaker 2:It's very common. As a matter of fact, in all the years that I've been out doing ministry on the street, it takes usually about a year, maybe two years sometimes, for girls to tell us their real names. Every single girl I've encountered has what they call their street name, and it's usually given to them by their trafficker, by their pimp.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of times this can be branded or tattooed on them. We know a lot of girls that come into our safe home. We do tattoo cover-ups, which is very common.
Speaker 2:Or they'll have their trafficker's name in addition to their own name, and sometimes you'll see women who have gone from trafficker to trafficker and they have multiple names on there and they've had multiple street names. We always know when a girl changes her name she's usually under another trafficker. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So this is all important information that we that can help identify trafficking situations, because a lot of times the people that are being trafficked don't even know. You know, thank God, this this 15 year old reached out and said hey, I'm being trafficked, but that language isn't very common. Most of the time they're just going to be seen as prostitutes or in prostitution. They're just going to be seen as prostitutes or in prostitution. So, continuing with the story, the teen tells the investigator that McGee forced her to give him all the money she made for her prostitution transactions.
Speaker 1:As the human trafficking detective is searching the hotel room where McGee and the teen stay, an 18-year-old woman walks into the room, sees the investigator, turns around, gets into a car driven by Kedria Grisby, which is the teacher, and inside the car is a 16 year old girl. The detective runs a criminal background check on and finds out she's been reported as a missing teen. According to the detectives, the 16 year old said she'd run away from home in october of 2022 and later moved into mcgee's home along with his parents and siblings. The 16 year old also tells the detective that the 15 year old who called for help that day was also a runaway. Okay. So this is another red flag. A lot of times when children go missing, when they're involved, when they're being groomed into sex trafficking, many times they're mislabeled as a runaway.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And traffickers actually look for vulnerabilities right. They look for runaways, they look for homeless within the homeless population, they look for homeless within the homeless population and you can see she utilized that vulnerability of not having a place to stay to bring them in.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. Traffickers will lurk in places like bus stations, group homes, even mental health facilities, hospitals, looking for this exact population, because they're vulnerable, they feel they have nowhere to go and so they're easy targets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, man, we have so much to cover. We haven't even gotten past the first incident, so we'll continue. Uh, the 16 year old tells a detective she and the other girls would make money by posting photos of themselves on sex ads. Okay, so here we have the online connection. We're always talking about how pornography fuels demand. Okay, how does pornography? How do these porn sites make their money off the ads that are posted on their sites? Where do those ads point to? These ads that are posted online to purchase local girls? And how common is it, dawn, that the women are also?
Speaker 2:they may be out on the street, street, but they're also posting stuff online they all, they all have an online profile, whether it be instagram or only fans, um, yes, every single one of them, and a lot of the transactions with what they call their dates, which are the men who are purchasing them, happen through these sites. They arrange, they arrange a date, a time, um, for a meetup, and that's yeah, and it's very common and also, you know, 16 year old, this is.
Speaker 1:This is not pornography, this is abuse, this is child images of child sexual abuse, right, um, and so we'll keep reading. So the 16 year old says she doesn't remember grigsby's name. But no, grigsby works as a teacher and this is also probably, uh, a little bit against the stereotype is a lot of time you think, oh, the trafficker is going to be a man, right, right, and even though this lady was utilizing her son, uh, that, that kind of woman as the trafficker, that's not in a lot of people's purview.
Speaker 2:Right and she seemed like she was the head of it, like she was running the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I'm I'm certain she utilized the fact that she was a teacher because, you know, kids, for the most part, are raised to think that teachers are trustworthy.
Speaker 1:Well, they should be, they should be Right, they should be.
Speaker 2:And they're people that you can confide in and who will give you good, sound advice. They'll get you the help that you need, not take advantage of your vulnerabilities, and sadly, that's what happened in this case.
Speaker 1:That's what happened in this case. Yeah, and that's a big piece of grooming is a lot of times the trafficker will appear safe or appear to be someone that's respectable in a community or someone who has a lot of wealth and influence. That's huge.
Speaker 2:Or oftentimes they're just good listeners. So if you have a runaway youth and you're willing to listen to the problems that they're telling you that they've encountered with their own parents, and traffickers are master manipulators who are going to take that information that you have given them and they are going to turn it and twist it until they are the only person that you think is for them and who they can trust, and so that's another common part of this whole process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's go back to the story. So she doesn't know her name, but she thinks she works as a teacher. So the 18-year-old woman walked out of the hotel and into Grisby's car, tells the detective she'd come back to the hotel to get her belongings and that Grisby was her stepmom. She says the 16-year-old missing teen didn't have a place to stay or clothes to wear, so Grisby got a hotel room for everyone to stay in for a few nights. And the 18-year old also admit she and the other two other teens, so there's several teens all engaged in prostitution. She confesses that she provides mcgee with her prostitution earnings and he protects her while she is on dates because he is her boyfriend. Uh, and I just think it's so important that we remember that. Hey, if, if someone's 15, 16 years old, their children that, and they're involved in a commercial sex act, that is by definition sex trafficking. A lot of the language people are using is, they're saying, child prostitutes and there's no such thing, right?
Speaker 1:uh, so let's, so, let's continue. So the next day, in a follow-up conversation, grigsby tells the detectives that she was at this hotel because the 18 year old asked her for a ride. She also tells the police that the 18 year old lives at grigsby's home and dates her son. Uh, grisby says she doesn't know the other teen and she didn't want her son to be at her residence with all of his female girls. Therefore she got him a hotel room. Grisby also tells detectives her son does not have a job.
Speaker 2:So oh, he has a job. Yeah, it's just not a legitimate job, right. Right he considers this his job, because he is. He is trafficking, he's exploiting young women. They all believe that he is their boyfriend yeah, which is which is common.
Speaker 1:Can you speak to that, because that's yeah I think that's hard for a lot of people to understand is like okay, how, how does the trafficker gain trust? And they're not even referring to him as trafficker, gang trucker, and they're not even referring to him as trafficker thinking in that that way, right?
Speaker 2:Right? Oh, not at all. Not at all. Most of the women that we encounter. Some of them have what they call gorilla pimps, where you know they've, they just rule with this heavy hand, right. But so many of them believe that they're dating their trafficker. They believe that he loves them, that he's for them and, like you were saying about Grigsby's son, the trafficker is their protector and it's very ironic because he's protecting them yet at the same time forcing them to go into encounters with men that are extremely abusive, with men that are extremely abusive.
Speaker 2:And a lot of times, even with Romeo pimps, they also use a heavy hand. So there's a lot of violence that happens within the relationship and it seems almost like a domestic abuse situation from the girl's perspective. But yes, they quite frequently think that they are dating their trafficker, even when he will have three, four, five other girlfriends. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know. I know you're thinking like, okay, the detectives are there, human trafficking detectives are there. This should be case closed. But it doesn't. It doesn't resolve. So a year later, 2023, a a client high school. Let me share it with you guys. A client high school employee meets with a harris county investigator involved in grigsby's case. The school employee tells the detective that grigsby is an employee at client high school and possibly recruits young girls to work for her and her son. The school employee says her family member, the 18-year-old arrested with McGee and released, met Grigsby's son on Instagram and eventually moved into Grigsby's home. Okay, here's another red flag. This is like classic scenario of trafficking. You know a lot of parents are worried about their kids getting kidnapped or going to the mall and a trafficker, you know snatching them, throwing them in their car and, you know, kidnapping them, that abduction while that does happen, it's such a low percentage.
Speaker 2:A majority of the time traffickers are on social media and this, uh like they met on instagram yeah, yeah, they it's, it's so common and if you, if you look at that, would you go back and read what you just read about his encounter with her online? So, she was a student and she met the son online. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I want you to think about that for a second. If I'm a teacher and I want to make money exploiting young people, then I can identify the vulnerable kids, young people then I can identify the vulnerable kids, give that information to my son, who can then befriend them through social media or, by the way, video games, video game chat rooms that's another huge platform for traffickers to be operating, and so they had. They had a whole system worked out. It sounds like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I mean even you know, for the 18 year old system worked out. It sounds like yeah, and I mean even you know, for the 18 year old this is coercion. This is manipulation, absolutely. She doesn't see the the kind of players behind the trap that she's fallen into right or does she understand what's going to come?
Speaker 2:you know it. You know what's in the future yeah, so let's keep reading.
Speaker 1:The school employee said she believed her family member was held at grigsby's home against her will and forced to prostitute between may and november of 2022. The school employee tells the investigator that the family member said eight girls were working for mcgee and grisby. However, the school employee did not know the teen's. Wow, so, um, this is, this is a trafficking ring, right, I mean, there's, there's a operation. It's not, uh, an international ring as we know there are sometimes. But, um, this is definitely involving multiple students, multiple teens. Yeah, uh, so let's keep going.
Speaker 1:So there was an actual complaint that the employee rights tells multiple senior level Klein district officials that Grigsby was involved in sex trafficking the employee's family member as well as other students, the employee's family member as well as other students.
Speaker 1:She said that she aided in the sale distribution of underage minor females minimum of eight girls it could be more to come forward and one female being a family member. The Klein High School employee notes in their February sworn statement to the school district that they do not know Grigsby personally and haven't met her at the school. So then you know, march 2023, they begin to do an investigation. They look into text records, phone phone report details several text conversations between grigsby and her son, and so, in a text exchange september 1 2022, mcgee reportedly asked his mother to print pictures showing mcgee dressed in expensive clothes and holding a large sum of money. They say detectives know through training experience that traffickers will post photos of money that is made from their victims' prostitution earnings on social media to show how much money he has made from victims. Dawn, is that something that you see?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I'm on some of these platforms because I use them to communicate with the women that we serve, and oftentimes we'll see pictures of money laid out. You know, sometimes it's just fanned out, but sometimes they'll even spell their name with the money and you know, it's like a status, a status thing, like look how much money I've made off of her back.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, so let's keep going. We haven't even gotten to 2024. In another text, exchange between grigsby and her son. Mcgee tells grigsby to hurry to the hotel because the 16 and 8 18 year olds were robbed by john. So john is a sex buyer. Um, I don't know why we just use that term, john.
Speaker 2:It kind of like john's yeah, throughout the world um, but don I mean?
Speaker 1:when we're talking about trafficking, we're looking at prostitution. They both end up in the same place. Um, whether you're being trafficked or you've made the decision to be renegade and you're going to be on your own out on the street doing prostitution, it's still the same dangerous place where you have sex buyers who are robbing. Just tell us some of the things we've seen, just how dangerous it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So robbery is often very common for the women, but also rapists. People don't realize that. Can a prostitute be raped Absolutely? And then you've got violence where when you look pornography, one in three porn videos are violent and a lot of the men who are coming to purchase sex from a woman they want to enact that same violence on the women. So it is dangerous physically, it's dangerous monetarily. And, going back to the monetary issue, if a girl services a customer and he takes up her time and then she has to get out of that car without money, then there's going to be hell to pay with her trafficker Because she's either going to have to work longer or she, in a lot of cases, will have to take a beating, because time is money and traffickers make sure that they are making those quotas that they give them, that they have to make a certain dollar amount every day yeah, and that's that's very common, especially, you know, we've done a lot of outreach out on bissonette.
Speaker 1:I actually found this article and wanted to bring it up because this is a part of the story that's left out of that other article but that not only were they trafficking girls out on 1960 in the hotels, but also on the bissonette track, and so, uh, let me post this right here. So this is one of the the victims and she was saying that she was 15 years old at the time when she met mcgee through a mutual friend while shopping. So she was, you know, somewhere shopping, told mcgee, uh told her and uh told her mcgee would take care of her and give her money. So mcgee had a friend who took this girl shopping and was kind of like the recruiter in this situation. So is that something we see like in grooming?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, absolutely. We call it the intoxication stage of it, where the trafficker or the recruiter will purchase things that a parent normally wouldn't purchase for a child, or, if the child's a runaway, they're going to be providing for their needs, and so we see it a lot, and we also see this type of thing happening at malls, where traffickers themselves or recruiters will be out at the malls looking for girls to start conversations with. They'll buy them something in the moment and that relationship is forged and then it progresses very quickly from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is the classic. Like you said, intoxicate, and there's that befriend, right. So you're gaining trust. You begin to intoxicate, introduce some other air, and then there's a moment where the tables turn Right and so she explains that. Uh, she says, you know, yeah, they were telling me all about all this money, but she left out the part that I had to sell my body, so that wasn't talked about. When he, mcgee, picked me up from the front of my apartment, he was running everything down to me. He basically told me I have no way out. So, as a 15-year-old, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2:There's not much you can do.
Speaker 1:So she said she started out walking along the Bissonette track. A week later, her pictures were placed on websites and she and two other young women would be abused by 10 different men each night in various hotels, one of them being Hotel Royale off FM 1960. And this is I mean a lot of people don't realize, but this is happening in a lot of hotels.
Speaker 2:It is.
Speaker 1:And one of the new strategies we're doing for intervention is taking missing children's posters and bringing them to the various hotels. So the young woman says she and her mother were arguing at the time of her disappearance, and I think this is something that we got to pay special attention to, because that is also something that the trafficker will utilize, will drive a wedge between a mother, a teacher, someone of influence a teacher, someone of influence and, yeah, a trafficker's.
Speaker 2:main goal, especially during the befriending and intoxication stages, is to turn the girl away from any person who is going to speak any semblance of common sense to them, any anything logical, anything sane, and he will manipulate or she will manipulate these vulnerable girls to just completely turn away from friends, from family, from church leaders, from teachers, anyone who is actually a trustworthy person. They work really hard to get them to turn away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a trustworthy person. They work really hard to get them to turn away. Yeah, and so I'm gonna keep reading because there's some important parts here. Um, so in november, she says her daughter contacted her and another family member from a private number threatening to commit suicide. So the mother called the police after getting her daughter to tell her where she was located.
Speaker 1:She and police found the girl in a hotel, heavily drugged and disoriented. She said he was feeding her percocets every day to keep her going. And the mother said she was. Her body was hurting, her legs was hurting, her neck was hurting, her back was hurting, her throat was hurting, uh, and so this, I mean we see the trauma, um, yeah, the substance abuse that's introduced, and this is another red flag. You know a lot of people aren't thinking about, um, the use of substances on victims that are being trafficked. But most of the time when we're doing outreach, I mean we, we clearly see that the substances are, you know, being distributed to the girls either before they arrive or while they're there, um, but that's very common to, uh, keep the girls awake or, um, just to be able to endure the type of abuse that they're experiencing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and especially with the younger ones, who are mostly kept in the hotels, it's also a way to subdue them to where they're not going to fight as much as they might initially, if they are not wanting to be there, which most of them, once they realize what's happening, they don't. So they do have to utilize drugs to to subdue them and and so that the girl can just make it through, um, these encounters with men that they're going to have to endure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean, this is, this is just a horrific case, and that's why we wanted to walk through all the details, because, you know, if people don't stop and read this or look into it, um, this is just going to be swept under the rug and problems like this will continue to happen, like this should not have gone on for as long as it did no, when the school district was notified, that person should have been removed Because she wasn't removed from the classroom, correct?
Speaker 2:It should have been an instant removal from the classroom and then the investigation. Even if they remove her with pay, they need to keep the children safe and we don't see that and we sadly in a lot of school districts throughout.
Speaker 2:Houston and throughout our country. They try to keep things quiet because it brings bad publicity like, oh, we hired this person who's a danger to children, and so they try to keep it quiet. And sometimes what you'll see is, rather than firing them, they will allow them to resign, and then they go to another school, and then to another school and another school. So these people, these predators, are just bouncing from school district to school district to school district gosh and don, you were a teacher, so how relevant is the trafficking conversation for school districts?
Speaker 1:It's not something we can avoid talking about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's incredibly relevant. I think that every school administrator and teacher Actually I think the whole staff should be trained in what sex trafficking is, signs, to look for how to combat it within the school system. But I also think that this is really a relationship issue and I think that if you know your staff really well, you might be able to see some of the red flags. But schools are so big nowadays, you know you might like I've taught in a school where we had 90 other teachers and so there's no way that anyone can monitor you know what, what, what's happening and and see that. And then they need to listen, like I think you were saying in that, and then they need to listen, like I think you were saying at the beginning of the article.
Speaker 2:Another educator's daughter was being trafficked by them and she reported it but nothing happened, and so they need to listen, because this isn't something that's happening elsewhere. It's happening in our schools.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's common and I think a lot of people are able to dismiss it, because a lot of people feel like, well, you know prostitution yeah yeah you know.
Speaker 1:But everyone is like oh, trafficking, absolutely, no, absolutely. You know, that's evil. I don't approve of that. But if we don't, if we can't recognize the connections between prostitution and trafficking, they both are leading to the same play. I mean, we have 15 year old girls being sold out on the streets. That that's trafficking, that's human trafficking. When there's an outcry like this, like in 2022, I mean, even the mother of the 15 year old was trying to get detectives and the school district to like do something, and no one did anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you look at the population that they were targeting, these are going to be kids who probably didn't have a really great reputation. They were vulnerable and so, rather than saying, hey, let's look at the root, what's going on here, they were looking mostly at the symptoms and they were saying, well, let's look at the root what's going on here. They were looking mostly at the symptoms and they were saying, well, of course, this girl might, yeah she's a runaway, of course she's going to become a prostitute, because that's what happens and they think it's a choice.
Speaker 2:but there's no way a 15, 16, or even a 17-year-old can make that choice. Their brain isn't even fully developed enough to be able to have the foresight to see what is this going to mean in a year and in five years if they're still alive, you know, in five years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so you know the case is pending, so we'll see what happens. But we really just wanted to get on here and break this down for you guys, because, guys, we have to educate, we have to bring awareness to this. We can't, you know, let this incident happen and not educate, not begin to spread awareness and hopefully, you know, if something like this happens in your school district, you know, hopefully we'll be able to spot it and stop it before it goes on for years and years and years. And you know, the recovery process, the restorative process for victims of trafficking is extensive. It's a lot of money, it's trauma therapy, it's physical ailments, overcoming substance abuses, which no 15 or 16-year-old should ever have to struggle through. That.
Speaker 2:Absolutely not. And, david, can I add one?
Speaker 1:more thing.
Speaker 2:You know, I taught for a number of years and I do want to say that the overwhelming majority of teachers out there are fantastic. They really do love kids. They want what's best for kids, but there are enough in the system to have a huge impact on the lives of many children and so you know, I want to give a shout out to all the teachers who are doing their job. They're loving these kids in the right way, but teachers themselves need to be paying attention to the person next door and keeping door and not keeping tabs, but building relationships so that you know, you can see these red flags before it spreads.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and of course, if you're connected with Elijah Rising, we believe in the power of prayer, and so pray for your school districts.
Speaker 1:Pray for our teachers, pray for the school officials, pray for the students, like this morning uh, we took time to to uh, dawn had printed out all the missing kids from this area and we just began to lay their, their faces out on the table and just just pray over them. The power of prayer, um, is effective. And also, you know, share this video with someone, share it with a parent, share it with an educator, a teacher, someone who works in the school system, someone who works with youth. These, I mean these red flags are all across the board.
Speaker 1:Trafficking looks different, but in many ways it utilizes the same systems systems of manipulation absolutely yeah so, thank you guys, let us know what you think and hopefully we'll be able to do some more of these type episodes where we break down the news for you to bring awareness and education about human trafficking.