GRIFFIN, Ga. — Two teenage girls are back home safe with their families in Spalding County after Griffin police rescued one of them from a suspected sex trafficking operation.
Police raided the home Wednesday, less than a mile from police headquarters.
“I don’t think anybody would have ever imagined it. I drive by the house daily on my way to work. So I was driving past that location not knowing what was happening inside,” Griffin Police Investigator Anaia Ruiz said.
Police were already investigating a case of two teenage runaways when one of the 15-year-old girls called them and said she escaped from a home where at least four men were trafficking her for sex.
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She told police the suspects were still holding her friend against her will.
“Once we realized the severity of what was going on, it became all hands on deck and knew we had to get her out. So, we got together, we used all of our resources, and we were able to get her out Wednesday,” Ruiz said.
Many of the investigators who helped rescue the girl are parents themselves, so this was a relief for everyone involved.
“You can never lose hope and sometimes it makes you lose a little bit of sleep, that’s just your motivation to keep going because it was a priority of life. We had to save someone, we had to save her life, we had to find her. You know that feeling when you’ve been holding your breath for so long and then you finally come up for air? When we got her in our arms, we were able to come up for that air and it was a huge sigh of relief,” Ruiz said.
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