Human Trafficking 2.0

Where the Sun Doesn’t Shine

A sign at the entrance reads: Welcome to Sunshine Liquor. But little sunlight makes its way into the messy fortress-like corner store at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Madre Street in Pasadena.

Sunshine Liquor and Market, where Christina Maricic, now 25, was kidnapped and trafficked as a young teenager.

These days, the large windows are covered with ads for cheap beer that block out the sun. Inside, there are tall metal bars on the inside of the glass. They offer a second layer of security. Even if someone broke through both, they would still have to climb over the mess of goods and piles of boxes stacked up near the windows. From the street, it is hard to see much of anything that happens inside Sunshine.

So it says a lot about the life of Christina Maricic, then a 14-year-old Mexican American girl who lived in a nearby group home for children in 2008, that she saw a place where people buy cigarettes and hard alcohol as her refuge.

One day, to escape the bullying children at the Rosemary Children’s Services home where fights were common and smoking weed was the norm, she took the three-minute walk to Sunshine. Dressed in her LA Dodgers skull cap and wearing acrylic french-tipped nails, the teenager was looking for a bag of Hot Cheetos and Arizona iced tea—her favorite combination.

Rosemary's Children Services in Pasadena, California.

Inside, a flamboyant and smooth-talking black man, who looked to be in his 30s, approached Christina. The man, who had an accent that sounded strange to her, wore white linen clothes and had keloid scars on his ears. He told her she was beautiful and he wanted her to meet his other girls, whatever that meant. He also told the 14-year-old he could help her make a lot of money.

Christina tried to ignore him, but the man became agitated and wouldn’t stop talking. Then, he and another large East African-looking man blocked the store’s two exits. Panicking, Christina tried to push past the man in linen, but he grabbed her and took her to a waiting white Range Rover with tinted windows. There, he repeatedly punched her in the face until she passed out.

Christina wasn’t just being kidnapped. She was one of the thousands of people who end up in the hands of traffickers in the United States each year. In all, the National Human Trafficking Hotline says that almost 11,000 cases of trafficking were reported directly to them in 2018.

According to the hotline, one case can refer to many people being trafficked, and more than 2,000 of the cases involved children and teenagers, especially from other parts of the world.

Here in Los Angeles, between 2010 and 2018, there were more than 170,000 reported cases of human trafficking.

Sex trafficking is the most common, followed by labor trafficking. In 2018 alone, LAPD data indicates that there were 25,729 cases of human trafficking that involved “commercial sex acts.” A commercial sex act is defined as “any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person,” according to U.S. Department of State.

The scale of the problem is no surprise to the staff of the Orange County District Attorney’s office. “I’d say in any given year, I encountered human trafficking survivors or survivors of those types of cases maybe twice a month,” said a lawyer in the office who spoke anonymously for the security of his clients.

A Seven-Year Sentence

Every person who gets lured in by human traffickers has a unique story, but experts note that some people are more vulnerable than others.

Christina’s biological mother struggled with substance abuse, so she was placed in the foster system as a young girl. Christina seemed to get a new start when she was adopted by a family in the affluent neighborhood of La Cresta in Riverside County when she was 6 years old. But it was not the loving family she hoped for.

Instead of seeing Christina as their child, they quickly began to treat her like a servant, often making her wake up before daybreak to do chores, and they gave her a long list of additional tasks after school. Partly due to her heritage, they referred to her as their “Mexican worker."

They were just getting started. Christina explained she was beaten and tortured by the family. They broke some of her bones and didn’t get her proper medical care. Christina also recalled sexual abuse by her adoptive parents, who groomed her and forced her to perform sex acts on their older son.

In her accounts, there was no break from the horror. She was frequently left without food, water or anywhere to go to the bathroom. In an apparent effort to break her will, Christina’s adopted parents sometimes made her stand up at times when she needed to sleep.

Because of the neighborhood where she lived, Christina’s neighbors refused to believe that she was being mistreated. To them, she was a troubled former foster kid with an attitude problem. But after seven horrible years with the family, teachers at Christina’s school noticed bruises and reported the abuse.

‘If they catch me,’

‘imma get beat’

Authorities returned Christina back to the foster care system, where she was moved between several different facilities and group homes, eventually ending up at Rosemary.

Foster children are special targets of gangs because they have no family to look after them. People who have already been trafficked are especially vulnerable to re-trafficking within two years of being a victim because many suffer from debt bondage or psychological, emotional and economic conditions, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

It was hardly a coincidence that traffickers would target Christina. So when the 14 year old regained consciousness in the back of the Range Rover after being taken from Sunshine liquor, she didn’t know where she was, how far she’d gone or where they were taking her.

Later, she gradually realized she had been moved to a home that was a base for a gang. “There was more girls in this house and it looked like a crack house. It was completely disgusting,” she later said. “There was like, I can see people were cooking, like, methamphetamines in the kitchen.”

The inhabitants were often aggressive, drunk, high and fighting. There, the men in charge started giving Christina alcohol, telling her it would calm her down. When she fought back, the gang members held her down and injected her arm with an unknown substance that knocked her out for hours or days.

Gang members took to raping Christina, she explained, individually and in groups. It all left her angry, scared and hopeless. Often, her captors hardly fed her. Between the hunger and the drugs, she spent weeks, maybe months “tired and in a daze.”

Then one night, Christina noticed people hurriedly running around the house, throwing things out of windows, screaming and shouting at one another, and trying to flush drugs down the toilet. That’s when she realized the police were on their way.

Sitting in the living room surrounded by panic and commotion, she realized this might be an opportunity. “I heard another voice inside me ... telling me: ‘You gotta go,’” Christina said, as tears welled up in her eyes. “And I just remember seeing the door and I remember being so scared because I was like, ‘If they catch me, imma get beat and imma be killed.”

Barefoot in short shorts and a tank top, she ran out an unlocked backdoor that had been left open, and kept running into the cold night for miles. Finally, she collapsed beside a library, in tears.