She built a ‘normal life’ after alleged abuse by accused KCK sex traffickers | Opinion

The little apartment that Natasha Hodge shares with her rescue cat, Lovie, is simple and spotless, accented in various shades of pink and featuring a couple of posters of Patrick Mahomes, along with one of a Frederick Douglass quote. “His name has two s’es,” she says, pointing out the misspelling on her wall, “but it’s the message I look at every day.” If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Tasha, who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, had until recently had a lot more of the first in her 47 years. But while I don’t know how many people there are in this world who have overcome all that she has to get to this cozy pink place with tinsel on the door, where she finally knows stability and peace, I’m going with this answer: not very many.

I have written before about how, at 16, Tasha ran away from the home where she’d been sexually abused from the time she was 6. But the protector to whom she fled, she says, was convicted drug kingpin and now indicted sex trafficker Cecil Brooks, who according to her moved her into his Delavan apartments rent-free, though at a very high cost.

He gave her dope to sell, she says, and asked her to have sex with other men, too, which she did. “I had no place else to go,” she told me. “It was a fire-to-frying-pan situation.” Brooks has pleaded not guilty to all related charges, as has his alleged co-conspirator, former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski.

“He was my introduction to, my first taste of street life,” she says of Brooks, who is someone Tasha says she first got involved with at only 14, when she and some girlfriends were sneaking into an apartment complex pool to swim. “He took full advantage,” she says now.

If I were working this case for the FBI, I would want to talk to Natasha Hodge, but once again, maybe that’s just me.

Not long after she left home and moved into Delavan, Tasha began using crack, too, and hustling to make a living. In February of 1996, she reported being raped by KCKPD Officer William “Ed” Saunders at gunpoint in the vacant crack house off Quindaro where she said in a sworn affidavit that he’d taken her in handcuffs.

She led authorities to what she called “DNA on a silver platter” — her nose ring was right there on the floor, next to the boot prints investigators cut out of the carpet, and a used condom was where she said it would be, too, tossed in the snow outside. Yet no one even had the courtesy to inform her that the DA at the time, Nick Tomasic, had decided against pressing charges.”

Maybe you recall, too, that all that happened after a longtime female KCKPD cop reported Saunders for trying to sexually assault her in 1999, was that it was the officer who’d turned him in who became a pariah on the force.

That no one took such reports at all seriously is how we got Golubski, who is now charged with federal crimes that include rape, kidnapping and protecting Brooks’ alleged sex trafficking operation at Delavan.

It was much later, starting in 2007, that Tasha knew Golubski as a client, but she never knew him to be in business with Brooks. “Not at all. I only knew Cecil’s inner inner circle, his family,” though Brooks did tell her that she never had to worry about a drug raid at Delavan, because “the police look out for me.”

Tasha also knew women connected to Golubski who were murdered, and whose homicides were never solved.

Women who slay their abusers have always been held to account in Kansas, though, and still are.

Star readers stunned her with GoFundMe donations

Two years ago in February, I wrote about Natasha’s release from the Topeka women’s prison, where she’d served almost 13 years for killing a man who routinely hit her with lead pipes and brass knuckles, burned her with crack pipes, smashed beer bottles over her skull, bit chunks of skin out of her back and threatened to burn down her mom’s house with her kids inside if she ever left him.

In case you’re wondering, the court fully recognized evidence that supported her claims of abuse. But her court-appointed defender told her to take the Wyandotte County prosecutor’s offer of a 15-year plea deal and say thank you, because a jury would have given her 50. You know, because criminals have to be held accountable.

The day Natasha and I finally met, after being in phone contact for a couple of years, she had just been released and had moved into the first apartment she’d ever rented on her own. “Excuse my language,” she told me, “but I’m 45 and I feel like a f---ing toddler out here. I’m sitting here with a perfectly good TV I don’t even know how to turn on.” When she’d last been out in the world, in 2009, she had an old flip phone and a new president, Barack Obama.

“There is a thin sheet of anxiety over everything,” she said that day, alongside the excitement of signing her first lease, which she cried when she showed me. This was in Abilene, where she knew next to nobody but had worked at the Russell Stover candy factory while serving her time. She continued to work there after getting out, to avoid the temptations of the familiar in KCK.

Even spending that first weekend scrubbing walls that weren’t dirty to begin with felt good: “It’s not really clean until you clean it yourself.” When the super showed up to give her a key to her new mailbox, she cried all over again.

In that column about her release and relaunch, I linked to the GoFundMe her family had set up to help her start over with nothing but $50, plus the bed and TV her brother had given her. Star readers not only responded, but stunned both of us by donating an incredible $26,339. She thinks about their kindness all the time, she said, and used that money to buy a used car she then had to learn how to drive.

And now, I get to tell you who did that for her some of what’s happened since then, which is that she has made a very different kind of life. “I’m so glad I haven’t disappointed anyone,” especially herself. She wanted me to tell this part of her story because she remembers when “I thought I could never have a normal life. When I was in the ditch, I’d hear about people who got out of the ditch, and I’d think, ‘How is that even possible?’“ She wants anyone else who might feel like that to know that it is possible.

Pickup with Confederate flag ran her off road

A little over a year ago, a man with a Confederate flag on his silver pickup intentionally ran her off the road in Abilene, where just under 1.5% of the population is Black. “He swerved like he was going to hit me, and I was shook.” That was the day she decided to move somewhere “with more people who look like me.”

She and her boyfriend, an Army vet who works maintenance at the candy factory, and who, though she doesn’t remember it, held the door open for her on her first day at Russell Stover, eventually moved into apartments across the courtyard from one another in Junction City.

For work, she said, “I walked into the Wendy’s and said I was applying for the manager’s job that was open! I was shooting for the stars,” she says, still kind of amazed by her own show of confidence. Her interviewer, she remembers, “said ‘OK, do you have any management experience?’ and I said, ‘No, I don’t, but I can learn anything I need to learn.’ He said, “Well, let’s start you out on crew,’ and today, I am a shift manager.”

She works the late shift by choice: “The initial thought was it will help me stay out of trouble if I’m doing something productive in the nighttime, safe at work.”

She has had no counseling since her release, and has never been in a recovery program, either, but has been clean and sober since her arrest in 2009. “I just don’t want to get high. I’ve heard people say they were functioning addicts, but I’m either all the way in or out. For so long, I wasn’t afraid to die out there; I just didn’t care. I know my boundaries, and I never want to be that person again.”

“There are lots of cops here” in Junction City, “and the old me” would have been afraid of them, but now, she might even call 911 if she needed to. “I feel safe.”

She appreciates all the little things that are really not so little, like communing with her “support cat” and getting to choose what to eat and when. Most days, she enjoys her job, and her relationship with “hands down the best guy I’ve ever been with” has certainly been a departure. Since their first date, bowling in Salina, they’ve talked “about literally everything. He’s striving for more, and he motivates me, too.” Oh, and he cooks.

She checks in every day with her best friend, her brother, Bobby Ford, who lives in Kansas City. “After I hadn’t seen her for a freaking decade, I’m not gonna lie, it hurt” having her decide not to move back to KCK, he told me. “But if that’s what it takes” for her to stay well, then he’s still all for it, all in for her, and so proud to see that “she has a glow now. She’s awake and blessed. She had a very, very rough upbringing, and the lesson she was taught was to realize how important everything in life is, even walking out the door without someone letting you out the door.”

Of course there have been disappointments and new hard lessons: She finally tracked down her biological father, only to learn that he’d died. “I never got to hear his voice.” And she got taken by a company that took her money but did nothing to help her develop a line of greeting cards for people in prison, where mail means everything.

Golubski will ‘never get what he deserves’

There are hard days still: She feels lonely sometimes, and doesn’t trust a lot of people. Catching up with technology has been a challenge, as has learning not to “hoard hygiene products. I’d go to the store and get all this body wash, like I didn’t know when I could ever do that again. I had to tell myself I could come back any time.”

One thing that’s helped her mental health, she says, is tuning out Golubski news after concluding that “he’ll never get what he deserves, and it’s depressing.”

It’s also a morale boost to be learning all the time. “I was really rough around the edges with the whole customer service thing in the beginning, but we’ve been filing away the edges.”

Rudeness does get to her occasionally, and “my old temper sneaks back in.” Once, after a co-worker she’d corrected about the right way to serve a gluten-free order cursed at her, she knocked the woman’s glasses off, out of public view back in the kitchen, and then burst into tears, “genuinely ashamed of how I reacted. Over a sandwich!”

They both apologized, are friendly now, and grateful that the general manager gave them a second chance. Really, aren’t a lot of life’s stupidest moments over something no more consequential than a sandwich?

One of Natasha Hodge’s greatest comforts is that for the first time in her life, she’s both independent and keenly aware that all she can ever hope to control is her own behavior: “Every day is a choice,” she says, and then “I go to sleep every night knowing my bills are paid. Every night I say out loud, ‘Thank you, Jesus.’ I want the second half of my life to be better than the first.”

And it already is.