Innocence Sold: Florida’s foster system provides dangerous sex traffickers with easy access to vulnerable children

Second of four parts.

Jayden Alexis Frisbee died last year at age 16. She had a passion for animals and music.

She left behind grieving sisters, a baby brother, her mother, and a grandmother who still can’t forgive herself for ever letting the Florida Department of Children and Families into Jayden’s life.

The state was in charge of Jayden through its privatized foster care system, and it made an inadequate, unstable parent. Jayden was shifted among 12 foster homes in a year and a half, and neighborhood sex traffickers caught up with her along the way.

She died on Jan. 11, 2021, in the bathroom of a Jacksonville Studio 6 motel.

A yearlong investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel exposed the complicity of Florida’s child welfare system in underage sex trafficking, through evidence found in government records, state and federal lawsuits, research studies, and interviews with victims and family members.

The Sun Sentinel found:

• When Florida’s child welfare system takes in a girl, the odds she will be trafficked for sex increase.

• Florida exploited a loophole so it could keep sending vulnerable girls to group homes, despite a federal law that discourages their use. Teen girls at those homes have been preyed on by traffickers who sometimes “shark” the block, waiting for a girl to walk to the corner store.

• Young people with a history of commercial sexual exploitation run away from group homes at an alarming rate, and those runaways are even more susceptible to sex trafficking. Yet, once they’re gone, no one tries very hard to find them, and nothing in Florida law requires them to.

It’s a dangerous mix: Foster care girls and trafficking victims share many of the same vulnerabilities — a history of abuse or exploitation, instability at home, insufficient parenting and emotional fragility.

Because there aren’t enough friends, relatives or foster home families who can care for teenagers, many of them are placed in institutional group homes staffed by employees. Those group homes are sometimes placed in unsafe neighborhoods where real estate is cheaper, and where traffickers are right outside.

“They’re looking for girls who no one’s looking out for, and that is pretty much a description of girls in foster care,” said Joan Reid, a University of South Florida researcher and associate professor who has documented the connection between foster care and child sex trafficking.

Florida is notorious for its rampant sex trafficking and is a tourist state packed with hotels, the top venue for this crime.

With growing attention to the issue, reports of child sex trafficking to the Florida Abuse Hotline have increased in recent years, hitting 3,182 last year, with the highest numbers in Broward, Miami-Dade and Orange counties, in that order.

But identifying who is responsible for allowing foster children to fall into trafficking is a challenge, Reid said. That’s because the Florida Legislature in 1998 voted to privatize the foster care system, leaving the care of children in the hands of contractors. In Broward and Palm Beach counties, that contractor is ChildNet Inc.; in Miami-Dade, it’s Citrus Family Care Network; and in Orange County, it’s Embrace Families CBC. They, in turn, hire subcontractors to operate group homes.

DCF deputy chief of staff Mallory McManus told the Sun Sentinel that Florida “has made tremendous strides in reducing the number of children in group care,” and said it would be unfair to blame the foster care system for this problem.

“It is not solely the fact that the child is in foster care that raises their vulnerability to become a victim of human trafficking — rather the abuse or neglect that led them into state’s care,” McManus said in an email.

Before privatization, the Department of Children and Families frequently made headlines over cases of neglected, abused or missing children. Privatization didn’t fix the problem, child advocates say, but deflected blame away from the state.

Whether run by DCF directly or private contractors, Florida’s foster care system has been failing young people for years, said Robert Latham, associate director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami.

“They should get out of the business of trying to care for teenagers,” Latham told the Sun Sentinel. “They’re horrible at it.”

‘A bad feeling’

Child welfare workers intervened in Jayden Frisbee’s life when she was 5 years old. Both her parents were fighting addictions to painkillers, so her grandmother, Glenda Usher, took in Jayden and her two younger sisters.

Usher told the Sun Sentinel that she turned to DCF for help when Jayden’s anger issues flared at age 14.

“I called the caseworker myself, trying to get help for Jayden,” Usher said. “I felt she was getting out of control for me.”

The middle schooler was placed in an institutional group home for three weeks, and then a family-style foster home in a high-crime neighborhood in Jacksonville, her grandmother said, and she started using drugs. Jayden’s family believes she met the men who trafficked her when she walked to a nearby store.

“The foster system failed her miserably,” Usher said.

Jayden’s mother, Chrissy Frisbee Morales, told the Sun Sentinel she doesn’t believe her daughter would have been trafficked had she not been placed in the foster system. DCF officials declined to comment on Jayden’s history, citing confidentiality laws.

“None of, like, the drugs and the sex trafficking, none of that happened until they put her in the first foster home,” Frisbee Morales said.

Jayden was in a special group home for trafficked youth when she ran away a final time, records show. It was five days before Christmas 2020, and Frisbee Morales said Jayden wanted to come home for the holiday.

On a Monday afternoon three weeks later, a 911 call came in from a 37-year-old, unemployed man who was staying in Room 331 of a Studio 6 on Philips Highway in Jacksonville. He told the police he’d met a girl at a gas station at midnight and she was on drugs with nowhere to stay. It was cold out. He offered his hotel room, and he said she slept on the floor.

She was moaning, and “out of touch with reality,” he told police. He asked her to leave in the morning, but she was still moaning and said she was tired. He left, and when he returned, she was dead.

Even though she was a child who had run away from a state-funded foster home in a nearby county, police couldn’t figure out who she was, and described her in reports as an adult. She had no identification and the man she was with didn’t know her name.

For more than a month, Jayden’s body lay in the Duval County morgue while Chrissy Frisbee Morales searched for her missing daughter.

“I just had a horrible feeling,” she said.

The complicity of the state

Documents show that the state has been aware for years that girls in group foster homes are specifically targeted by sex traffickers.

Though the number of children placed in foster care, including group homes, has declined in Florida over the past decade, hundreds of teenagers are still placed in such homes each year.

In September of 2022, 29% of the teenagers in Florida foster care were in group homes, according to DCF reports. The numbers were even higher in ChildNet’s territory of Broward and Palm Beach counties — 36%. In neighboring Miami-Dade County, 19% of teens were in group homes. In Embrace Families CBC territory of Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, it was 31%.

Broward County Public Defender Gordon Weekes reported what he considered “unsafe” and “abusive” conditions in a bluntly worded 2014 letter to DCF after he visited several group homes in Broward County.

His letter to the head of DCF alleged that child-welfare workers knew girls in the group homes were targeted by sex traffickers, “yet little has [been] done to address the traffic recruiter that prowls the area seeking out vulnerable girls in foster care as prey.”

“Knowingly placing highly vulnerable foster care girls in such an environment without protection is tantamount to state-sponsored human trafficking, and it must be stopped,” Weekes wrote.

In recent interviews with the Sun Sentinel, Weekes described a culture that allowed underage girls to stay out until 2 a.m. and return with their hair or nails done, or carrying unexplained expensive items — and neither the staff nor the police asked many questions.

“It was implicit that they knew, and they weren’t gonna ask, and the young ladies knew and they weren’t going to tell,” Weekes told the Sun Sentinel.

DCF deputy communications director Laura Walthall said Florida’s 249 group homes are not the first preference for placing foster children. “The primary goal is to place children in a family-like setting where all of their needs can be met,” Walthall said in an email.

But as of Oct. 21, there were only 18 family foster homes in the entire state that are approved to care for a trafficking victim.

Walthall and McManus emphasized that three-fourths of Florida’s child trafficking cases are children who were not in foster care.

“Traffickers target the vulnerabilities of both community children and children in the dependency system,” Walthall said in an email. “In recent years, physical proximity to traffickers has proved less important in recruiting than access to social media.”

The latest annual report on trafficked Florida foster children, by the state Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, found that 21% of the 377 verified child trafficking victims in 2021 were in DCF foster care.

Weekes sent his letter to DCF eight years ago, but the state still oversees a system that provides traffickers with ideal targets.

“Group homes create an unregulated environment where children can literally walk out and meet a stranger across the street — a perfect hunting ground for traffickers,” said Justin Grosz, a partner of Kelley Kronenberg law firm and co-founder of Justice for Kids, a division of the firm.

In October, Grosz, a former Broward County prosecutor, filed a lawsuit against ChildNet and several of its contractors on behalf of a girl who entered foster care at age 12, and was trafficked by men in the community during her years in state care.

“Group homes within Florida’s child welfare system have been an open market for human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of minor children for far too long,” the lawsuit claims.

ChildNet CEO Larry Rein, through Chief Legal Officer Jason Tracey, declined to comment on the lawsuit and this report because the case is pending.

The suit alleges the girl experienced years of inadequate supervision and mistreatment at group homes. When she was 14, the lawsuit says, she used her ChildNet staff advocate’s cell phone to connect with a man who wanted to pay her for sex.

The advocate “was aware that she was involved in human trafficking and recruiting other girls,” the suit claims.

Even after a court in June 2018 ordered the girl placed in a group home for trafficking victims, the lawsuit says, ChildNet left her in a regular group home for months, although staff suspected trafficking was occurring “on or near the grounds” of the home.

The teen ran away for six months and, when she resurfaced in May 2019, was finally placed at Images of Glory in Orange County, one of the handful of “safe houses” for verified trafficking victims. She had been in the foster care system for more than three years with evidence of repeated sex trafficking.

A few months later, she was sent to the ARRIS Fort Lauderdale group home on Northeast Third Avenue, just north of Sunrise Boulevard. The home, run by the Agency for Community Treatment Services, or ACTS, was one of those Weekes called out in his letter to DCF.

At the ARRIS home, the girl was questioned by FBI agents over “allegations that she had recruited other girls into the world of human trafficking.”

Within months, at age 17, she got pregnant. The father was a man she encountered outside that Fort Lauderdale group home. He was 39.

ACTS officials declined comment for this report, citing Grosz’s litigation.

No stable home

Children in the state’s foster system who had previously been exploited or are at most risk of being trafficked are especially mishandled by the state, a Sun Sentinel analysis of DCF data shows.

The data contains the placement histories of 355 foster children between 2012 and 2021 whose records indicate they were trafficking victims.

The children were moved an average of 21 times while in the system, according to the data, which is made available to the public by Latham through his work at the University of Miami. As an attorney, Latham represents foster children in cases against DCF.

Although their time in foster care varies, the children were moved an average of 10 times a year. One child was moved 142 times from ages 12 to 18.

Jayden Frisbee’s case is a chilling example of the repeated shuffling.

She was placed in group homes or institutions for six of her 12 foster care settings, records show.

Her final placement, in September 2020, was at the Images of Glory “safe house” in central Florida. Her mother said Jayden liked how she was treated there and was scheduled for release if she completed one more month of programs. But she ran away. In their last conversation, Jayden promised to go back to her group home after her birthday so she could ultimately return to her grandmother’s house, Frisbee Morales said in a voice choked with emotion.

Jayden turned 16 on Jan. 5 and died six days later. But her body remained unidentified in the morgue until Feb. 25, when the family’s fears were confirmed.

Glenda Usher, Jayden’s grandmother, shared her story in a March 2021 letter to then-Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls, imploring him to help.

“I did not know what else to do so I requested from the judge to take Jayden out of my care and was hopeful that she would straighten up,” she wrote. “Had I known what being in foster homes would lead to, I would have never had her out of my custody and for that I will never forgive myself.”

System failure

Study after study points to a connection between foster care and sex trafficking.

Professor Reid at USF was blunt in titling a 2018 report “System Failure! Is the Department of Children and Families Facilitating Sex Trafficking of Foster Girls?”

Reid is director of USF’s Trafficking in Persons — Risk to Resilience Research Lab. In a relatively small study she conducted, she found that three-fourths of the trafficked foster girls she examined were not exploited until they were placed in Florida’s foster system.

“One girl explicitly stated, ‘Going to group homes has “turned me out.” ... I didn’t do this until I got there,’ ” Reid wrote in her report.

A growing body of research backs up her findings. Members of Congress were told in a 2019 report that “emerging” evidence shows removing kids from their family homes makes them more likely to be trafficked.

And a Florida study found that trafficked foster children were twice as likely to have been removed from their families, five times as likely to have been put in a group home and 10 times as likely to have run away from foster care.

Advocates say that the challenges of living in a group foster setting — lack of attention and structure, few personal belongings and instability — can lead teenagers to willingly go with traffickers who may offer love or gifts such as food and clothes.

“Kids in foster care ... they live with strangers,” Latham said. “These people don’t love them. … And this is what they always say about traffickers. Traffickers do love them. And traffickers will put up with anything that kid throws at them.”

The budget for a four-bed Fort Lauderdale group home run by ACTS allows for $1,200 per year for clothes for all the children, $2,800 for entertainment, $2,800 for earned allowances and $9,900 — or about $7 a day per child — for food. Just 3% of the home’s budget is set aside for direct spending on the children.

A teenage girl who went missing from a Broward County group home several years ago was found to be communicating with a 60-year-old man who ran an escort website. She asked him to pay her phone bill in return for sex.

“Hey neil i have a question,” the girl wrote one September day in 2018, according to police records. “My phone goes off tomorrow could you please pay it for me & and i take the money from the session please.”

Traffickers lurking

Jayden’s first foster home was in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Jacksonville, her mother said, echoing a key issue raised repeatedly to the Sun Sentinel.

Weekes told the Sun Sentinel that the privatized system leads to cost cutting at the expense of children. Homes are often operated where real estate is cheapest, and that means high-crime areas where encountering traffickers is more likely.

Reporters located two ACTS group homes on one street corner in Fort Lauderdale. One week after reporters visited the sites in May 2022, a 14-year-old girl was raped at knifepoint in broad daylight by an adult stranger in the fenced yard of one of the homes.

The Sun Sentinel found reports over the past year of assaults, robberies, drug offenses, burglaries, car thefts and more — all within just a few blocks of the ACTS group homes.

DCF officials told the Sun Sentinel there is no data showing that “neighborhoods play into children being trafficked.”

But the Sun Sentinel heard a striking narrative over and over: girls being recruited from right outside the state-funded home where they are supposed to be safe.

A 14-year-old girl in foster group care in Pompano Beach, for example, walked to a nearby convenience store and chanced upon a 30-year-old neighbor, Shanteria Barnes, a recent federal case revealed.

The girl asked to move in with Barnes for a few days. During that time, Barnes had sex with men for money and pushed the teenager to do so as well, telling her she needed to pay rent and advertising her online for sex, according to federal court documents. She would be “broke forever” if she didn’t do it, Barnes told her.

Barnes, who went by the name “Pumpkin,” also enticed an 11-year-old runaway to have sex with men, charging each $40, authorities said. She and a co-defendant — her former boyfriend, Cleon Kirlew — were sent to prison this year after pleading guilty to sex trafficking of minors.

On the run

There’s a common thread to many of these girls’ stories: They had run away from foster care, and no one came to find them.

Foster kids in group homes are even more likely to run away, according to the Sun Sentinel’s analysis of DCF data.

Of the 355 foster kids analyzed, 82% had run away during their time in the state’s care. Those in group homes were even more likely to run, the data showed.

When Jayden ran away, she was trafficked and beaten, police records in Duval County say.

In September 2020, after 44 days at a group home, she fled and ended up being sold for sex by adult men out of a motel room, according to Jacksonville deputies.

A 34-year-old man who had sex with Jayden told deputies that three adults in the room beat her up after accusing her of stealing their drugs. One of them kicked and stomped on her head and she was hospitalized with two black eyes and swollen lips.

After that encounter, Jayden was placed back in the “safe house.” After 21 days, she ran away.

And runaways are easily exploited, experts say.

The experience of a 16-year-old Broward girl shows how it can play out. She fled her group home in Hollywood in December 2020 and met an adult man. He took her to the Miramar home of a man named Frantz Mersier, who offered her his couch, a federal criminal complaint says.

Mersier asked for sex, and she later told authorities she felt she had no choice.

He began charging other men to have sex with her, each time pocketing the $100 they paid, according to federal prosecutors.

Finally, left alone in a hotel room, she called for help.

Mersier pleaded guilty in June to child sex trafficking and is now in prison.

When girls like her run away, Florida law does not require group home operators to look very hard for them. The law says “reasonable efforts” must be made.

DCF policy sets out more detail: a list of people to notify and information and material to gather. Actual attempts to locate the child — going to locations where the she is known to hang out, for example — is set at once a week at first, then drops to once a month.

McManus said most runaways in Florida and the U.S. are recovered, and she pointed to DCF policy requiring law enforcement to be called immediately if a child who is a known trafficking victim runs away.

Professor Reid said foster providers should have safety plans for kids who are at higher risk of running away, including providing them emergency phone numbers and addresses of shelters.

“It’s almost like they’re afraid to talk to them about running away because it will make them run away,” Reid said.

But running away is rampant.

The two Fort Lauderdale ACTS group homes near Sunrise Boulevard, for example, together accounted for one out of every three missing persons reports in the entire city of Fort Lauderdale from 2017 to 2021.

The cases get little attention from law enforcement or the media, especially when the children are Black or Hispanic. History has shown the relative lack of attention girls of color get when they go missing. The majority of children in Florida’s foster care system are white, but Black children are still overrepresented relative to their population, the Sun Sentinel’s analysis of data found.

“People have decided what a good victim looks like and what a bad victim looks like,” said Jumorrow Johnson, anti-trafficking coordinator for the Broward State Attorney’s Office.

Johnson said girls of color can be seen as tough, street smart and not in need of a search party.

“It’s in the fabric, it’s in the DNA of this country,” Johnson said. “It’s in the DNA of law enforcement.’’

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, said there’s long been a double standard.

“It’s just a travesty that when a white girl goes missing, it seems disproportionately important to the media, to law enforcement, than it does when girls of color” disappear, she said. “When a girl, or any child, goes missing, there should be urgency.”

What can be done?

Wasserman Schultz has worked on these issues throughout her career in state and federal politics.

She sees an important role for non-profit organizations to help children avoid trafficking, or help victims heal.

There’s no easy solution, she said, because children who are placed in foster care or in group homes were removed from their families for a reason.

“You’re rescuing them from one horrific situation and putting them potentially at risk for another,” Wasserman Schultz said. “Group homes are never the best environment for children. Institutionalizing a child is not a normal environment or potentially a healthy one.”

Latham said the state should look for alternatives other than removing children from troubled home environments, including providing parents and families with support and mental health services.

“There’s just so much we could do to be making life better for kids so that going to a guy who is going to exploit you doesn’t feel like a step up,” said Latham. “Usually they just want to be around a human being that doesn’t treat them like they’re broken.”

Shanika Ampah, a trafficking survivor in South Florida who works extensively with other trafficking victims, said foster children have already been abused, and then are abused again in state-sponsored care.

The National Foster Youth Institute estimates that 60% of child trafficking victims are current or former foster kids.

“The numbers are so high that we have to do something about the next pipeline of our victims,” Ampah said. “Those are children waiting to become the victims.”

Ampah, who was trafficked from age 11 to 18, said an important first step is educating the public about what to look for. Even as she was being sold for sex in Miami, Ampah would often sleep in her own bed at night as the adults in her life ignored indications she was being trafficked by older men.

“We think that human trafficking is all about these chains, and people are just being handcuffed,” Ampah said. “But it’s really the manipulation of the mind. And if your mind is enslaved, you’re enslaved.”

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is the chairwoman of the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking, and her office prosecutes multi-county trafficking crimes. Asked what her office is doing to stem the flow of foster care girls into trafficking, a spokeswoman pointed to two recent trafficking cases prosecuted by her office, one involving a runaway and the other a foster child. Moody declined to be interviewed.

DCF Secretary Shevaun Harris also declined to be interviewed. Walthall, a spokeswoman for the agency, said caring for trafficked children “has long been a priority for the department.” She said DCF focuses intently on prevention measures.

Giant loophole

In an effort to reduce the use of group homes, Congress in 2018 passed the Family First Prevention Services Act. It told states that the federal government will only fund two weeks of group home care for foster children, with a few exceptions.

Florida changed its policy in 2020 to exploit an exception for trafficking victims.

The state created group homes for children who are at risk of being trafficked — and defined that broadly. Under the state’s new definition, a child is considered at risk if he or she “has experienced trauma” and has run away, been sexually abused, was exposed to human trafficking, moved repeatedly within foster care, or interacted inappropriately with other people or on social media.

Florida’s Children First, a Coral Springs foster child advocacy group, opposed the state’s change, arguing that the definition is so broad it could apply to more than half of the state’s foster kids.

As of July, 150 group homes in Florida’s foster care system are for these at-risk children, Walthall said.

DCF’s McManus said many were regular group homes that “implemented enhanced training of staff to better provide trauma informed care and protect those who are more vulnerable or at risk of trafficking.”

Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida’s Children First, said the number of kids in group homes would be much lower if at-risk group homes hadn’t been created.

“The bottom line is Florida relied heavily on federal funds to pay for kids in group homes,” she said. “And when they saw that that source was going to dry up they had to come up with a way that they could keep putting kids in group homes.”

The state doesn’t have an accurate tool for determining which children have been trafficked or are at risk. The screening tool used by the state since 2016 has flunked repeated efforts to validate its accuracy, the DCF’s own reports say.

But it continues to be used today.

McManus said DCF is “actively reviewing and implementing” potential improvements.

So young, so lost

A Miami grand jury examined the issue of child sex trafficking 10 years ago, and was shocked at how young the victims were. The average age that a child is first forced into commercial sex is 12 to 14 years old — their middle school years.

“We would hope that there is not and has never been a little girl who, while growing up, dreamed of becoming a prostitute,” the grand jury wrote.

“Our hope and expectation is that girls today grow up wanting to be doctors and lawyers, scientists and teachers. And, perhaps little girls still dream of becoming ballerinas and princesses. But never, never ever, should they decide at a tender age that what they ought to do is sell their bodies for money.”

Jayden Frisbee had a lot of ideas about what she wanted to be, her grandmother said. A rapper, a veterinarian.

Her autopsy report declared her death an accidental overdose of cocaine, methamphetamines and fentanyl.

After she died, her family asked for her possessions from the trafficking victim safe house. They received a composition notebook — the kind used by grade-school students.

In it, Glenda Usher said, “she had a huge list of men.”

DCF paid for her funeral, her grandmother said.

But she still has no headstone.

If you have tips, feedback or information for the reporters, email ITeam@sunsentinel.com. More ways to submit confidential tips can be found at SunSentinel.com/tips.

Innocence Sold: More in this investigation

Part 1: Behind hotel room doors

Hotel rooms are the most frequent crime scene for sex traffickers. Yet, despite a three-year-old Florida law the allows hotel operators to be punished for failing to take required steps to prevent trafficking, the Sun Sentinel’s investigation found that not a single one has been fined. The powerful lodging industry has fought off attempts in the state Legislature to allow trafficking victims to sue them.

Coming Monday, Nov. 28: Felonious Florida podcast

A new six-part season of the award-winning podcast Felonious Florida brings you back into the Dark Side of the Sunshine State with the mysterious story of Sophie Reeder and other young girls who have been lured into the dangerous world of child sex trafficking. For more information, including ways to listen, visit FeloniousFlorida.com.

Part 3, coming Monday, Nov. 28: Where’s Sophie?

Part 3: At just after midnight more than five years ago, 15-year-old Sophie Reeder walked out of her Fort Lauderdale home and disappeared. Initially thought to be a runaway, evidence emerged that she had fallen into the hands of sex traffickers. But just how much effort investigators made to find her isn’t known. The family says they were stonewalled from the start and leads were never explored.

Part 4, coming Sunday, Dec. 4: Punishing the victims

Part 4: Victims of sex trafficking are frequently retraumatized by a system that was designed to investigate, indict and prosecute them for crimes they are coerced by their traffickers into committing — even when the victims are children. In the end, girls are left with few options and no help clearing their tarnished records.