On April 8, 2022, a 15-year-old girl from North Richland Hills, Texas, visited a Dallas Mavericks game with her dad. Horrifically, when she went to the bathroom shortly before halftime, she was kidnapped and trafficked to a hotel in Oklahoma City in which she was held hostage for over a week. Fortunately, she was rescued and reunited with her parents after 11 interminable days. Now, however, the teen and her family are suing the hotel chain.
As background, the teen was discovered to be missing when she didn’t return, and video footage from surveillance cameras viewed that night showed her leaving the American Airlines Center in Dallas, in which the game was being played, with a then-unknown man. That was on April 8, 2022. She then was discovered in a hotel room on April 18 after she was identified through an online advertisement.
The Oklahoma City Police arrested eight individuals in the wake of the incident, and authorities charged them with numerous felonies, including human trafficking. Among them is Kenneth Nelson, 44, who was is serving a 25-year sentence over numerous horrific crimes related to the girl’s kidnapping and trafficking.
Now, the teen and her family are suing the hotel chain in which she was trafficked. Explaining why the hotel chain must be held accountable, her lawyer, Zeke Fortenberry, said, “This girl was being sexually assaulted in a hotel room multiple nights. Any time she could have been rescued from that sooner would have been better.”
Continuing, Fortenberry added that the hotel staff should have noticed something was wrong, saying, “When a 40-something-year-old man walks in with a 15-year-old girl and rents multiple hotel rooms, and then there is traffic coming in and out of those rooms, those are red flags.”
Fortenberry filed the lawsuit against the hotel chain on February 5, 2024, naming multiple corporations, including Dallas-based Provident Hospitality Holdings LLC and Aimbridge Hospitality, in the lawsuit. For reference, Provident Hospitality owns the Extended Stay America hotel at the Oklahoma City Airport in which the teen was trafficked.
In the lawsuit, Fortenberry contends that hotel employees “either failed to recognize the signs of human trafficking or chose to turn a blind eye and ignore what was happening to [the teen]. and never made any report of human trafficking.”
Further, the suit contends that hotel surveillance cameras captured video of the teen entering numerous rooms rented by Nelson, and that in the footage the young girl was “under the influence of a controlled substance and staggering up and down” the hotel’s hallway. Yet more shockingly, the video footage showed that on “more than one occasion” an individual “with an AK-47 style assault rifle” was captured on camera marching up and down the hallway.
Yet more abominably, the lawsuit contends that at one point a hotel employee did nothing after the young girl reentered the hotel “visibly upset and crying.” The lawsuit claims “Nelson’s two acquaintances escorted her back to a hotel room and the Defendant Hotel Manager’s employee did nothing to help [the teen] and returned to work behind the front desk.”
Further, the lawsuit contends that the company knew about trafficking occurring in the hotel, claiming, “Prior to [the teen] being trafficked at ESA OKC Hotel, Defendant ESA Corporate knew that sex trafficking was occurring at its corporately owned and affiliated hotel properties.” Despite that knowledge, it claims, “all Defendants chose to turn a blind eye to the crimes and trafficking going on at the ESA OKC Hotel, and chose to put profits over people like [the teen].”
Featured image credit: By Jeff Attaway – File:American_Airlines_Center_(6246886325).jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88757895
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