DAYTONA BEACH — Inside those worn, charmless Ridgewood Avenue motels are rooms that became Joni Harper’s torture chambers.
That was where a sex and drug trafficker essentially imprisoned Harper for more than eight years and ordered her to have sex with one man after another, day after day. He controlled her with forced heroin injections, constant beatings, and stints in a locked cage.
His ruthless thrashings with a steel-toed boot pounded into her head and face left Harper completely blind two years ago.
Another Volusia County woman, 19-year-old Larchelle, was a 14-year-old runaway escaping abusive parents and foster homes she detested when she unwittingly steered herself into an Orlando sex trafficking ring. One pimp threatened to kill her with a machete when he thought she gave a customer too much for his money.
Harper and Larchelle are not just rare, tragic victims. Thousands of people – both adults and children, males and females – are sex trafficked in Florida and across the country each year.
It’s been a hidden but entrenched problem for decades in Daytona Beach, a tourist town that draws 8 million visitors each year who pour in looking to let loose during Bike Week, Biketoberfest, Daytona International Speedway races, Spring Break and other special events.
“Traffickers will take their victims and travel to cities where there’s a large sporting event or gathering,” said Sarah Marie Henry, executive director of Catch The Wave Of Hope, a South Florida nonprofit that fights sexual exploitation and trafficking. “Those areas are hotbeds for an influx of these (trafficking) cases happening. It’s big business.”
Florida ranks third in the nation for reported human trafficking cases, with only California and Texas reporting more victims. In 2023, the most recent year for complete trafficking tallies, Florida recorded nearly 2,100 human trafficking cases.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received 36.2 million reports related to child sexual exploitation in 2023. More than 45,000 of those reports were connected to Florida.
Harper’s story
When Harper was 16, she was living an average teenage life in a small Minnesota city, completely unaware a 32-year-old man had started stalking her.
On a cold December morning in 2006, she was walking to school but never made it there. Harper woke up in the back seat of the stalker’s car. He held her prisoner for seven hours, sexually assaulting her and cutting her with a box knife.
She escaped and made it home, but one night she was startled out of a sound sleep by the abductor removing the air conditioner from her bedroom window. Luckily he failed to get into her house.
Becoming the man’s prey wrecked Harper. Her mother, Liz Williams, said her daughter started carrying stuffed animals around and sleeping at the foot of her parents’ bed.
Harper also started to do drugs, ran away and got pregnant.
In 2010, she went through drug rehab and moved to Florida with her parents. She was 20 years old and starting to live a new life.
But six months later, Harper was hanging out with addicts again and doing drugs. It was then that she met Derick Jones, Sr., a sex trafficker who kept trying to get her to work for him.
She kept saying no, so one day some people took her by force and turned her into a Ridgewood Avenue hooker. Whatever motel room Jones was staying in to sell drugs and run a prostitution ring, Harper was there.
She escaped Jones many times, but he always found her.
‘The day has come for him to pay’
Jones ordered her to make at least $70 every day. If she didn’t come up with the money, she would be beaten either by Jones or someone he directed to do it.
Harper sometimes called her mother pleading for cash so she wouldn’t get pummeled. Her parents, who currently have a GoFundMe page set up to help their daughter, are not wealthy and usually couldn’t spare much money.
Police eventually caught up to Jones. He was arrested in December 2022 on charges that he was confining Harper and two other women in hotel rooms on South Ridgewood Avenue and beating them if they didn’t prostitute themselves.
Jones was convicted in July 2023 on a multitude of charges including human trafficking; deriving support from prostitution; armed trafficking in fentanyl; felony battery; possession of cocaine with intent to sell; attempted witness tampering; possession of methamphetamine; and possession of cannabis.
Jones, who’s in his early 50s now, was sentenced to life in prison followed by 160 more years behind bars.
An assistant state attorney read Harper’s statement during Jones’ sentencing hearing: “Finally the day has come for him to pay for every fist that hit my face, head and ribs; every time he picked me up and body slammed me; for that time he hit me in the head with a steel-toed boot on his fist.”
Harper has accepted her new reality, and she’s learning how to function without her sight. She walks with a white and red guiding cane, she uses a voice-activated computer and she’s learning to cook. She paints, draws and crochets when she wants a creative outlet.
She lives with chronic pain from all the beatings, and she pops medical marijuana gummies to be able to sleep. When she needs to release the anger over what she’s been through, she has boxing gloves and a punching bag.
The 34-year-old plans to write a book about her life, and she wants to become a victim advocate.
“No matter what happens to you, don’t let it bring all of you down,” Harper said. “My eyes may be impaired, but the rest of me isn’t. … It’s never too late to turn your life around.”
Larchelle’s story
One of the only people Larchelle has tender childhood memories of is her maternal grandmother, who lived in Michigan. Her mother struggled with drugs and alcohol, and lost custody of Larchelle several times. She’s only seen her father twice in her life.
Her uncle molested her when she was 5 years old.
“I never got over it,” said Larchelle, whose last name is not being used to protect her. “A lot of anger built up.”
Four years later, when she was 9, her stepfather touched her inappropriately. Her mother didn’t believe her.
When she was 12, she got into an explosive argument with her stepfather. He slung her onto a bed, choked her and wouldn’t let her leave their condo.
Larchelle grew increasingly angry and unhappy, and she ran away. Not long after that, she was put in a group home in Sanford and her mother said she didn’t want her back.
“I was like, my mom gave up on me. Wow,” Larchelle said.
Her grandmother, her only refuge, began developing dementia, and she lost the one person she turned to for comfort and support.
She attempted suicide a few times in the years that followed, and she began a cycle of being placed in foster homes, running away, winding up on the streets, and then living in another foster home until she ran away again. She couldn’t find peace anywhere.
Molly and a manipulator. ‘He took advantage’
Her mother terminated her parental rights to her in 2019, when she was 14. In 2020, the young teenager was roaming Orlando alone when she met a man at a convenience store.
“He asked if I wanted to sleep in his daughter’s bedroom,” she said. “He gave me Molly (a stimulant and hallucinogen). I was very high. We drank. We had sex. He took advantage.”
The next morning, she walked to a store and met a man who knew her name before she said what it is.
“He said, ‘you stayed with my dog last night. I know a woman who will take care of you,’ ” Larchelle said.
She was getting pulled into their sex ring, but she was a child who never saw it coming. A man in their network gave her marijuana, Molly and a dress. He told her to put on the dress and walked her to a hotel on West Colonial Drive in Orlando.
She was still only 14 years old, and the customer said he wasn’t going to have sex with someone so young. He still gave her the $160 she requested, her trafficker took $100 of it, and she was allowed to keep $60.
She said the trafficker had sex with her that night, then had her watch him and his girlfriend have sex. After that she was placed with a female trafficker who gave her money and took the 14-year-old to nightclubs and casinos.
She was shifted to a second female trafficker after that who had her selling marijuana and prostituting herself at Orlando hotels. Larchelle said she “stayed doped up” on Molly and cocaine, and “did what they wanted.”
When a third male trafficker walked her to the house she had stayed at that first day she was wandering around alone, she realized for the first time that the five traffickers all knew one another.
In 2021, a few months before her 16th birthday, Larchelle was placed in the Volusia County foster home of Arletha Baxter, who is specifically trained to help kids who’ve been trafficked. Baxter insisted on strict rules, and helped Larchelle stabilize enough to graduate high school and leave the drugs and trafficking behind.
“Miss Baxter is the only reason I’m on my feet now,” Larchelle said.
Larchelle’s mother died of cancer in 2023. Her stepfather died in 2022.
Three of the people who trafficked her were sent to prison.
Larchelle has her own apartment now, and works as a receptionist. She’s still in the foster care program, which gives her someone who checks in to see how she’s doing as well as financial help with rent and tuition.
She’s enrolled in college and working toward becoming a prosecutor. Larchelle and Baxter are also trying to raise enough money to create a safe house for eight local young women who’ve survived sex trafficking.
“I used to see it as my childhood was stolen,” Larchelle said. “But if those things never happened, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”
The foster mom: ‘People don’t believe it’s happening’
Baxter first became a foster parent 24 years ago. She also founded a nonprofit called STEEP House that helps her educate and advocate.
“People don’t believe that it’s happening,” Baxter said. “I was dealing with it firsthand. I wanted girls to know what they told me wasn’t falling on deaf ears.”
Most often it’s a family member, not a stranger, who traffics a child, Baxter said.
One man who couldn’t pay his rent gave his 9-year-old daughter Tylenol 3 to put her to sleep, and then let his landlord have sex with her.
Baxter also knows of a 14-year-old girl reeled in with an offer to get her nails done for free. Before the child knew what was happening, a man in his 50s was raping her on a slide in a park. A trafficker set it up and kept the client’s payment.
Kids who are trafficked more than once are often trading their body for drugs or something to survive, such as food or a place to stay. Under Florida law, prosecutors don’t have to prove that anyone younger than 18 was coerced to get a trafficking conviction.
Baxter has fostered a total of 36 girls over the years, 11 of whom were verified trafficking victims. The youngest girl she helped was 6 years old when she arrived.
Baxter tries to maintain contact with the girls after they become adults, and the follow-up on the 11 who were trafficked has been discouraging.
Only one has maintained a stable life so far. Some of the remaining 10 young women live on the streets, or have drug and alcohol problems. One sleeps at a local car wash.
‘A hemorrhage to the soul’
Rainey Nave was sex trafficked from the time she was 3 until she was 17. The 44-year-old’s abuse began with a family member.
“It was a long, hard battle to get where I am today,” Nave said. “Healing is a never-ending journey. … It’s difficult to break those chains.”
Nave said French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre described trauma as a hemorrhage to the soul.
Survivors who’ve escaped still have panic triggers that would never occur to most people. Clean white bedsheets have been the canvas of rape for some. A hug was foreplay for others.
Nave is the international vice president of Bikers Against Trafficking, a nonprofit she and her husband co-founded in 2016 that provides survivors trauma counseling, housing, food, job placement and mentoring. In 2024 alone, they helped about 120 people who ranged from 6 years old to 32.
She said victims can be as young as a few months old.
“The younger they are, the more money they’re worth,” Nave said. “There’s a lot of sick people.”
Perpetrators can be anyone. It’s not always a stranger, and it’s not always the older man trafficking the young woman or girl.
“If we’re looking for this cookie cutter image of what it’s supposed to look like, we’ll miss it,” Nave said.
Nave, who’s an addiction counselor, said drugs are often interlaced in trafficking because it helps the traffickers control the people being prostituted, and drugs allow the victims to escape what’s happening to them.
Even after people break free from sex trafficking, it can be difficult to end their drug use, Nave said.
“You are still forced to live day and night with the memories and images which seem far too real,” she explained. “You can still smell, taste and feel them as though they are happening in the now. You feel alone, and so it’s easy to turn back to a substance which seems to have provided the only sense of comfort that you knew while you lived in what felt like hell.”
Nave spreads herself thin helping trafficking survivors, but she said it’s become her passion.
“It’s just fulfilling,” she said. “It gives me hope.”
If you suspect someone is being sex trafficked, call local police or the national hotline at 888-373-7888.
You can reach Eileen at Eileen.Zaffiro@news-jrnl.com
