Her 15-year-old daughter fell prey to a sex trafficker
When the teen didn’t come home from the mall one night, a mother followed text message records to a horrible discovery.
ON A LATE DECEMBER AFTERNOON, Sara Loe pulled up to a house in Savin Hill to drop off her 15-year-old daughter, Jane, at a friend’s. Jane had said the two girls, friends since kindergarten, were going to the CambridgeSide Galleria to do some post-holiday shopping.
In the more than three years since, Sara (her name and her daughter’s were changed to protect their privacy) has played this mundane scene out in her head thousands of times: stopping across the street from the house, offering her daughter spending money, her daughter refusing it saying she had gift cards, then stamping across the street in leggings and pink Doc Martens boots.
Sara has now shared this story with her attorneys and a documentary filmmaker and in testimony she submitted to the US Senate. Every time, she explains how Jane had begun distancing herself from Sara around her 15th birthday, acting more sullen and moody, the result, Sara assumed, of hormones and teenage rebellion. Sara and her husband of two decades had run a tight ship for their three kids in their Dorchester home. As a stay-at-home mom, Sara shuttled Jane to dance classes and monitored her social media feeds and text messages, asking questions about any new friends. “If you ask my kids,” says Sara, “they’ll probably say I’m a pain in the butt.”
Parsing the memory again on a clear morning this January in the 48th-floor offices of her attorneys, she has a moment of revulsion when she remembers the pink boots. “I hate those boots now,” Sara says. “To me they seem like trouble.”
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