Teen Lured Via Gaming App, Used As Sex Slave For A Year

Florida police arrested six men and a woman for allegedly luring two teen boys to a trailer via an online gaming app and using one of them as a “sex slave” for a year.

St. Petersburg Police Department began the investigation after they rescued two teen boys, aged 16 and 17, from a mobile home in May 2018.

The 17-year-old was persuaded to leave home by someone he met on Discord, a gaming chat service. He was then moved to a trailer surrounded by animal cages and feces.

When police searched the mobile home, they also found the 16-year-old boy. Though one of the accused claimed to be the boy’s father, it was revealed that the boy was reported missing from Florida’s Marion County a year ago.

Investigation revealed the two boys lived in the trailer with four men — Mark Earl Dennis, 52, Andrew Barry Dennis, 45, Curtis Lee Gruwell, 34, and Michael Wayne Schwartz, 51.

Further investigation revealed that the boy had informed his family acquaintance, Eleanor Faye McGlamory, regarding his unhappiness about staying at home. She then befriended the boy and introduced him to Mark Dennis and Andrew Dennis, who then picked the boy up and moved him to the trailer. The boy’s mother filed a missing person complaint after she found a letter from him telling her not to look for him again.

“The teenage victim in this case was lured from his family with promises of a better life. Instead he was moved into a filthy trailer and used a sex slave for nearly a year,” said Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, the Spring Field News Sun reported.

While, the 16-year-old is “is receiving specialized trauma-informed care designed for victims of human trafficking and is thriving,” police believe the 17-year-old was not sexually battered and was returned home.

While six people were arrested on human trafficking charges, Monday, the seventh suspect turned himself in the following day.

“You would not think that you live in Florida, it’s an ideal place to live work and raise a family. We all know that, and yet we have the third highest incidents of human trafficking in the nation,” Moody said, adding “As a mother, I cannot begin to stress how disturbing the facts of this case are for me,” Fox News reported.

Natasha Nascimento, founder and executive director of Redefining Refuge, a Tampa Bay organization told Fox 13, “Traffickers and predators are using social media every single day to recruit children.”

“We’ve had children in our program who are born and raised sort of in foster care unfortunately, and we’ve had kids in our program from seven-figure households where they have parents who are physicians. So, no child is exempt," she added. The investigation is ongoing.