a teen from texas who was Kidnapped from NBA game and then sex trafficked She revealed the terrifying week of abuse when she was taken 200 miles from her home, raped and featured in an online sex ad.
Natalie Cramer was only 15 years old when she and her father Kyle Morris attended a Mavericks game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on April 8, 2022.
The now 18-year-old, who admitted she used marijuana and alcohol to deal with her anxiety, recalls feeling anxious when the basketball game started.
“I was feeling good and ready to hang out with him,” he told WFAA. “We got there, sat down in our seats…the first quarter happened, and I just started getting this anxious feeling. It is the craving to take drugs or get intoxicated.”
Cramer told her father she was going to the bathroom, but she never returned to her seat.
The teen left her phone behind and made eye contact with her would-be kidnapper, 33-year-old Emmanuel Cartagena, on the arena stage.
“I was just wandering around and then I noticed this guy,” she said. “I told him, ‘I’m really feeling like smoking. Do you smoke?'”
Cartagena reportedly said he smoked and had marijuana in his car, where he met another man.
“He didn’t tell me there was someone else there with him,” she said. “It was just him. He told me that we would walk back to his car which was parked in the parking lot… in the garage… and then another man came. They told me that ganja was still in the car.
The two men took Cramer to a home in North Texas where he gave the 15-year-old weed, “but he had a lot more on his mind,” she admitted.
He was kept in the house for several days before his kidnappers handed him over to a different group in Oklahoma.
Morris reported his daughter missing to the Dallas police officer at the field, but was told he would have to report him as a runaway to Cramer’s hometown police, where the game was being held.
Cramer was previously described as a runaway because she had fled her home for various reasons.
“I was vying for attention,” she said. “I was running for love. I was running for drugs. I was running from things I couldn’t control…that I couldn’t speak about.”
During those fateful 11 days when she was missing, Cramer’s parents sought help from a private investigator in Houston, who discovered that sex traffickers had posted photos of their daughter on an online sex ad.
Investigators tracked Cramer to Oklahoma City.
She remembered seeing a family in the hotel hallway when she was drunk and accompanied by people with assault rifles.
“I was even more surprised to see a family there with young children and they looked into my eyes and saw that all these people were older than me and still weren’t saying anything,” Cramer said. “The fathers of these little kids looked at me, and they couldn’t tell in the hotel. (The man who trafficked her) had a complete rifle, and the family carried on as if nothing had happened.
The teen’s family filed a lawsuit against the Extended Stay America hotel at the Oklahoma City airport, where she was held, claiming that staff either failed to recognize signs of human trafficking or turned a blind eye and ignored it. Did it. The outlet reported in February.
Cramer described the day he was saved as he received an answer to prayer.
“I was just praying to God,” she said. “I’m tired. I can’t do this anymore. I need someone. Please send someone.”
An Oklahoma City police officer spotted the teenager wandering outside an apartment complex on April 18 and questioned whether she was Natalie Cramer.
Cramer told the officer that she had been raped.
As the teen told it, within minutes eight people were arrested and later sentenced for their role in trafficking.
U.S. Marshals arrested Cartagena in January 2023 and charged him with sexual assault of a child, accusing him of driving Cramer away from a Mavericks game and assaulting him before bringing him to Oklahoma. WFAA reported.
The Dallas County Grand Jury decided not to prosecute him based on the evidence.
“I felt some guilt,” Cramer admitted. “I know there were things I could have done to prevent it, but I know that all the choices that were made were not my choices. A part of me felt guilty, but I had to come to terms with that fact. But it has to be my life, and I can’t feel sorry for them because they didn’t feel sorry for me.”
Cramer is now using her experience to warn others, saying her kidnapping was not like the typical “candy guy in the back of the van.”
“It seems like a normal conversation until it doesn’t. You don’t know you’re in danger until you’re in the middle of it and you don’t know what to do and you can’t get out,” Cramer explained. “There is no scope for judging people because they cannot step out. If they can go, they will go.”
Cramer did not realize she was in danger until she was raped.
“I knew by then I was in danger, but I didn’t know how to get out because I was scared. I could have asked for the phone, but they would have been right there. What should I have done? Even if I ran, where would I go? I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
The teen, who is sober and pursuing her GED, says mental health issues could be to blame for her escape, adding that she was not in therapy and was self-harming.
“To be found, that was definitely God being like ‘I’m not going to leave you; I won’t let you die,” she said. “It’s all because of my family, my boyfriend and my dog…he also saved my life.”
(TagstoTranslate)US News(T)Dallas Mavericks(T)Kidnapping(T)Oklahoma(T)Rape(T)Sex Trafficking(T)Teens(T)Texas
