The mother of a North Texas girl sex trafficked at the age of 15 is calling attention to loopholes in the legal system that led to what she suggests was the gross mishandling of her daughter’s case.
“Astounded” by the local authorities’ treatment of her daughter’s harrowing sex trafficking experience in 2022, Brooke Morris recently told Texas Scorecard that she “can’t let this go.”
“As a mom and as a woman, this is a hill I’m willing to die on,” she said.
From the reluctance of the Dallas Police Department to investigate her daughter’s disappearance from a Dallas Mavericks game to the failure of Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot to prosecute a key suspect in the case, Morris has several bones to pick.
As previously covered in The Dallas Express, Morris’ teen daughter was spotted by surveillance cameras in April 2022 leaving the American Airlines Center in the company of two men, one of whom was later identified as 33-year-old Emanuel Cartagena.
After her parents received no help from local police departments, the Morrises solicited the services of a private investigator with the help of the nonprofit Texas Counter-Trafficking Initiative. Thanks to the discovery of an online ad offering sexual services with the teen’s photo, she was traced to a hotel in Oklahoma City and rescued.
As Morris explained to Scorecard, the authorities’ missteps began when her husband was not allowed to file a missing person’s report for their daughter with DPD. Instead, he was told to report the disappearance to his local police station in North Richland Hills. Morris said this was because her daughter was automatically considered a runaway, which she flagged as “an enormous problem” with the system.
Morris reported that DPD and the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office also refrained from going to Oklahoma to collect evidence for the case despite the authorities there inviting them to do so.
Dallas officers arrested Cartagena in January 2023 on charges of child sexual assault after the teen picked him out from a lineup and testified that he had raped her before he took her to Oklahoma. As Morris recalled, the family’s lawyer offered DA Creuzot further documentation, such as the victim’s medical records and therapy notes, which he turned down.
“If I need it, I’ll subpoena it,” Morris remembered him saying.
Even though Cartagena had a prior conviction for compelling minors into prostitution, DA Creuzot’s office did not recommend an indictment, and the case was ultimately no-billed by a Dallas County grand jury.
“The guy who did this had done it before and will probably do it again,” Morris said.
January is National Human Trafficking Awareness Month, which aims to shine the spotlight on this dark, often clandestine criminal activity to support its victims and help prevent it from happening to others.
In honor of that, Morris hopes to use her daughter’s story to identify “the loopholes that go in the criminals’ favor” and see that they are closed. She also stressed the importance of making changes to state law that will hold local authorities and prosecutors more accountable for taking steps to safeguard children from sexual exploitation.
“My daughter is safe. But we are not the norm. What about all the other victims?” she said.
DPD, which has been laboring under a significant staffing shortage, fielding only 3,000 officers when a City report calls for 4,000, saw a 15.4% year-over-year rise in human trafficking cases in 2023, according to the department’s crime analytics dashboard. Meanwhile, budgeting only $654 million for DPD this year, Dallas city officials will be spending much less than other high-crime jurisdictions, like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
