Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie.
She surveyed the intersection in South Central Los Angeles, where preteens were hobbling in stilettos and G-strings. It was a Tuesday night this January, and Ana knew that most of the girls longed for a coat or gloves — anything to keep them warm — but covering up was not an option. Their eyes were cast down, but their hands waved mechanically at every car, angling for another customer to help meet their traffickers’ quotas.
Ana was working, too, but the years had worn down any visceral anxiety into something more like resignation. Ana was 19, but the girls on the street reminded her of herself and her sister when they were first put out on Figueroa for sex. She had been 13. Her sister, 11.
Their story had been unoriginal, at least for this street: foster kids turned runaways turned recruits, drawn in by a new friend on Instagram who offered to help them get by. The friend dropped Ana and her sister off at a motel on Figueroa and handed them lacy bikinis. Ana asked what they were for. They needed to turn in $800 each by morning, the friend said. They stood on a corner, shivering. It would take at least half a dozen customers each.
By now, Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. (Ana’s full name, as well as those of other trafficking victims in this article, are being withheld for their safety.) She knew to approach cars from the passenger side and get the money as soon as she climbed in. She knew which motels had rooms set aside for just this purpose; which schools and businesses didn’t padlock their parking lots at night. And she knew she needed to be dropped back off on the Blade every 30 minutes if she was going to reach her new quota of $1,200. The sameness in the days and weeks and months on Figueroa was such that Ana remembered little of them.
The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California, and yet another universe. Parents pushed strollers past the trafficked girls as they took their own children to school. Amid boarded-up storefronts were a few that catered specifically to the trade: a smoke shop with the banner “free Magnum condom with any purchase” and a lingerie store named — in cursive — Sluts. Figueroa seemed to be the one street in all of Los Angeles where nobody ever honked: Customers waited politely, as if in line at a drive-through, to peruse the menu and take their pick.
Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.
The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota.
In the shadows, Figueroa had become more violent. The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota. The traffickers who governed the street were worse. Tonight Ana was waving at cars in front of a tire shop when a trafficker pulled up on the wrong side of the street, climbed out and beat one of the girls near Ana over the head with a pistol. The girl had probably looked at him wrong, Ana decided. She knew better than to intervene.
When he left, Ana plodded over to her own trafficker to ask for a break. The answer was no. Ana took some Percocets and chased them with Hennessy to numb herself. The temperature dropped, and soon she felt herself longing for another customer’s car, just to get out of the cold.
Ten blocks south of Ana, Officer Elizabeth Armendariz was sitting in the passenger seat of an undercover Ford Five Hundred, holding a police radio to her mouth. She pushed her hair off her shoulder and assigned positions to each of the vice-unit vehicles participating in the night’s operation.
Armendariz, 27, had a broad range of missions she directed on Figueroa for the 77th Street Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. There were sting operations to arrest traffickers she had corresponded with online, and motel raids that busted scores of customers in the act. But tonight was what she called a “juvie rescue op”: a sweep down the Blade to find as many juveniles as possible — to help them escape, but also to gather new intel on their traffickers.
Armendariz’s eyes darted among the half-dozen girls in the intersection. She chose a blonde with a white hair bow, who looked especially young.
“Seven-eight and Fig, west side, smack in the middle,” Armendariz said into the radio. “Hit her up for me.”
A male undercover officer in a Dodge Caravan would approach the girl from the south, she told them, and secure the verbal evidence; a black-and-white patrol car would hide around the corner, waiting to come in for a pickup.
The Dodge pulled up. “How much?” the undercover officer asked the girl.
“Um, $100 for everything,” she said, leaning in the car window.
Then he asked: “You guys do threesomes?”
Armendariz signaled for the patrol car. She watched closely. Many girls feared the police because their traffickers would punish them if it looked as if they were cooperating. Once in a while, the girls fled. This time, Armendariz saw it first.
“Female running northbound,” she said into the radio suddenly, glancing over at her sergeant, Alvaro Navarro, in the driver’s seat and giving him a nod. He threw the car into reverse, then jerked forward, cutting across the intersection to trail the girl with the white bow, who had broken into a sprint, her sandals flung off half a block back.
“I’ve got her hooking that left, going westbound on Seven-seven,” Armendariz said, swearing under her breath as the girl disappeared around a corner. But two patrol cars converged from different coordinates, throwing their doors open and locking her in.
For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not.
Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. “Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,” said Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet.
As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem. According to Navarro, the 77th Street Division was supposed to have six investigators at Armendariz’s rank in its vice unit. Instead, she was the only one.
Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.
Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.
The girl in the white hair bow didn’t look much older than that.
“You’re not in trouble, sweetheart — we want to help you,” an officer shouted to her as he jumped out of his patrol car. She tried to hide. Armendariz cracked open her tinted window just enough to see the officer grab the girl’s wrists, cuff them and turn her toward a fence. Then Navarro veered slowly back into the flow of traffic, undetected. Armendariz shook her head. Up close, the girl had road burn across her stomach and a busted blood vessel in her eye.
“Female detained,” she said into the radio. “Thank you, guys.”
Ana had been an easy target for trafficking. As a child, she bounced among apartments and shelters with her alcoholic mother. Her violent father was in and out of their lives. She was taken away by child protective services for the first time at age 8, and then shuttled for years among foster households and group homes in a county that neighbored Los Angeles — sometimes with her siblings, sometimes without. There was never any sense of belonging.
Eventually, she and her sister ran away together. Their first night living on the street, Ana was raped by a stranger, she says, but she kept running. If they were going to be on the move, they wanted it to be on their own terms.
At every house transfer or juncture, Ana had a hope — however dwindling — that her mother might make good on her promise to get them back. Then, at 13, in the early months that Ana was being trafficked, she called her mom for help. She had already lost track of her sister. This time, her mother was much more direct: If Ana had gotten herself into “the game,” as she called it, she would need to get herself out. Ana didn’t know how. She scraped the braces off her teeth with nail clippers to hide her age and settled in.
To Ana’s mild surprise, no one from the child-welfare department seemed to come looking for her, either. She wondered if they were relieved to be dealing with one fewer foster kid. It was true that California’s foster care system was buckling under the weight of demand. There were too many children, too few good homes and a caseworker turnover so high that it was nearly impossible to keep track of kids who went missing.
More than half of the underage girls pulled from the Blade turned out to be from foster care. Even for those who were not runaways, the stories were the same: Traffickers had parked their cars in front of local group homes, waiting for a chance to approach. There were the “Romeo” types, who would flatter a girl, take her on a few dates and then send her out to the Blade. And then there were the “gorilla” types, who acquired a girl by brute force.
By the time Ana was 19, she had been put on the street by at least 17 people, she says — mostly men, a few women, all of them with fancy cars and strict rules. Ana’s face, neck and hands had been tattooed with their monikers, as if she were cattle. They had shuttled her among at least five different cities but, like other girls, she always seemed to end up back on Fig.
Even on this January night, several traffickers were trying to draw Ana into their so-called stables — another girl to add to their profits. One had run up behind her yelling, and another had threatened to run her over with his car. Ana strode across the intersection, then back, hoping to lose their interest. She knew the deal: If they touched her — or if she looked them in the eye — she was theirs. Then she would have to worry about another ex-trafficker who might come back for a violent revenge.
There was a familiarity to the chaos and dysfunction here, a commonality among the girls that Ana could only see now that she was older. They were children who presumably belonged to somebody — but nobody seemed to be looking for them. In a way, that made Fig feel like home.
After the rescue at 77th Street, Armendariz headed back to the station to start paperwork. The number of rescues in the past few months had far surpassed any in the division’s recent history, but that meant she was always buried in reports.
The truth was that Armendariz had not joined the vice unit out of passion so much as obedience. Two years ago, Navarro took over the unit, and he asked her to come with him. He saw potential in Armendariz, a young patrol officer on his watch with boundless energy and a hunger for getting to the root of a problem. Armendariz had that unusual combination of candor and collegiality: Her directives often included multiple expletives but ended with the word “partner.”
Within a week in the new position, she was galvanized. She could not believe what traffickers were getting away with on the Blade. When Armendariz was 13, she had been in the youth cadet program and was focused on roller skating and Taylor Swift and the annual family trip to Disneyland. But here were girls whose faces had been burned with cigarette butts; whose nails had been pulled off; whose hair had been set on fire; or who had been held down in a bathtub and shocked with a Taser. There were stories of girls who had simply disappeared.
She wanted evidence to put traffickers behind bars. She worked overtime and conducted rescue operations even on her days off in the hopes of persuading girls to identify them. But the girls rarely complied. Most felt a deep psychological tie to their traffickers, the most consistent authority figure they had ever known. Others knew that flipping on them meant being hunted down as soon as their traffickers were released.
Still, when the team brought girls into the unit — strung out on drugs, irate at the officers and desperate to get back to the Blade — Armendariz alone could often get through to them. She stocked chocolate bars and potato chips and gave them fuzzy socks to replace their stilettos. It was what she would have wanted at 13.
Within eight months, Armendariz was promoted and became the senior officer in the unit, designing creative operations the team could run with its skeleton staff. Fueled by caffeine, nicotine and Tums, the team’s rescues shot up, from just 15 in 2023 — when SB 357 first took effect — to 54 in 2024 and a fast-rising 2025 figure set to surpass 100. There were days Armendariz took the team out at 6 a.m. and secured multiple rescues before 9. But there was also a depressing reality to the growing list: the number of repeat names.
Earlier that night, officers pulled Ajena, 15, from the Blade for the third time. Armendariz had never met a child with such street loyalty. Ajena’s trafficker had just hours earlier split her lip, because she smirked at him, and threatened to shoot her in the leg if she walked away. She still spit on the officer who asked her to share his identity, and when her cellphone rang, his contact came up as “Daddy.”
Destiny, also 15, was brought in so often that she knew the vice unit’s sour-candy inventory. Armendariz filed yet another report on her this week. When an officer asked for Destiny’s address, she threw her head back, snorting with laughter. “If I lived somewhere, I wouldn’t be out here,” she said. Destiny told officers she hadn’t seen her foster care case manager, who was supposed to be doing monthly meet-ups, in more than two years.
It was a similar cycle of rescues with Ashley, and Kayla, and Saphira, and Malaika and Margie Ruth. After interviewing each girl, Armendariz kept her company for hours until someone from the Department of Children and Family Services came to pick her up. In theory, D.C.F.S. staff would take the girl to a hospital for a health screening and then to a temporary housing placement, before ultimately finding her a new foster household or group home. But time after time, the agency reported back to Armendariz that the girl had jumped from the car as soon as it pulled out of the station. The agency estimates that three out of four rescued preteens and teenagers go back to their traffickers. (Brandon Nichols, the director of the county’s D.C.F.S., said that “our social workers do everything possible, as many times as necessary, to help these young people safely leave their captors and begin healing on their own terms.”)
Armendariz started her report about the girl with the white hair bow. Her name was Jeziah, and she was 17. According to the logs, tonight’s rescue was her first, and Armendariz could tell: She was the first girl in a long time who said she wanted help getting out.
“I’m fresh,” the girl said to an officer in Interview Room 216, curled up with a Cup Noodles and a new teddy bear. Just a few months earlier, her new boyfriend put her on the Blade to help with bills, then took her phone and started forcing her to stay out there all night. “You get into something with somebody, and you think it’s one thing — I thought totally wrong.”
She touched the road burn on her stomach. He had dragged her down the street by her hair. Her eyes began to well with tears, but she blinked them away.
“Life just be life-ing,” she said.
A support volunteer told Jeziah that she deserved better than this; that she was so young — she could still become anyone she wanted to be. Jeziah nodded. When the officer and the volunteer left the room, the video camera kept rolling, and the girl sat quietly alone. She studied her teddy bear’s face and paws, then kissed it on the head, cradling it to her chest.
Armendariz would call D.C.F.S. for the girl and then return to Figueroa later that night. Eventually, the girl with the hair bow would, too.
The thing about Ana was that she had been rescued before, and she had gotten closer to freedom than just about anybody else.
In September 2021, when Ana was 15, a sergeant matched her tattoos to ones he had seen in an online sex ad and began to track her. When she was finally found, the sergeant wept from relief and told her about a woman named Shannon who could help her. Shannon Forsythe ran an anti-trafficking nonprofit called Run 2 Rescue, which included a recovery house for four girls. A spot had just opened up.
The Run 2 Rescue house was not a typical group home, the sergeant told Ana. The organization took no government funding, which meant Forsythe could run the home as she wanted. There were no cellphones, no weekend passes, no revolving door of shift staff. Instead, the girls had live-in parental figures — Forsythe and her husband — and a customized healing plan they worked through as a unit. There were therapists, addiction recovery counselors, nurses and tutors. The girls kept journals. They navigated conflict at the kitchen table. They took trips to the mountains and the beach and Baskin-Robbins, sometimes twice a week. Forsythe’s house had only one real rule: Everybody agreed to abide together. No more running away.
Ana heard all of this and scoffed. She had lived in plenty of group homes, each with its own set of surprise horrors. She was not interested.
That sergeant would have needed to pass Ana off to D.C.F.S., but there was a warrant out for Ana’s arrest — by then Ana had committed a variety of crimes, some forced by her traffickers, some of her own volition. Instead of a new foster care placement, she was sent to juvenile hall, which bought Forsythe months to win her over.
Forsythe called Ana every week to pray with her. She showed up at the courthouse for every hearing, even though she wasn’t allowed in the room. She pleaded with her social worker and the judge to sign paperwork that would help grant her power of attorney.
Ana wanted to know who this odd woman was, this woman who seemed obsessed with — and maybe capable of — keeping her off Figueroa. Deep down, Ana wanted that, too, and so far, Forsythe seemed to keep her word. After four months, Ana relented. As they pulled away from the courthouse in Forsythe’s car, Ana noticed that the back seat doors were unlocked, but a gut feeling told her not to run.
With Forsythe, Ana began to experience childhood anew: bedtime stories, warm milk before bed, a kitchen play set for toddlers that entertained her for hours. They marked her height on the wall in the hallway and visited Disneyland, where Ana picked the treat she had always secretly wanted: a Mickey Mouse balloon that lit up in the dark. Forsythe helped Ana get her traffickers’ tattoos removed and go back to school, where she became vice president of the student council. Ana began volunteering to fight human trafficking and started college classes to become a nurse.
During her third summer with Forsythe, when Ana was 18, she hit a common recovery barrier: She started to wonder whether she deserved this new life. And even though she adored Forsythe, there was someone else she couldn’t stop thinking about: her mom.
Ana was all cleaned up now. Was it possible that her mother might find this version of her more lovable? Then her mom had a baby — a sure sign that she wanted to start fresh — and Ana thought maybe there could be room for her in her mother’s new family as well. Ana said nothing to Forsythe, but her mind was made up. She was leaving. In the end, it was a silly fight over a candle, and Ana walked out Forsythe’s front door.
Then came the dominoes. Ana realized her mother was still drunk. The new baby was neglected. Her mother’s boyfriend started propositioning Ana for sex. Ana stayed with a series of old friends, one of whom put her back on the Blade. This time, Ana went back to Figueroa knowingly — willingly. She had violated Forsythe’s only rule: No running away. She felt these were her consequences to reap.
There was a moment, on a hot afternoon in August 2024, when Ana thought she might finally be free. A trafficker who was driving Ana to the Blade worried that the police were following him and rounded an off-ramp too fast. He accidentally floored the gas pedal instead of the brakes. There was a cement wall; then complete darkness; and then slowly, the acrid smell of oil. Ana crawled out of the car and heard her own voice calling for Jesus to take her as she lay there in the dirt.
Ana had seven surgeries and spent a month in the intensive care unit — a fractured face, a broken back, knocked-out teeth, a ruptured colon, among other injuries. When Ana was discharged to continue recovering at her mother’s house, she could not walk to the bathroom or to the kitchen for food. Her mother often lay passed out on the couch. Ana missed almost every medical appointment. She went a month without a shower. Her hair fell out.
Ana didn’t know it, but Forsythe had been thinking about her all this time. She had visited Ana in the hospital four times and was riddled with guilt that she couldn’t invite Ana back, but she had already taken in a 12-year-old in her place. She tried to stay in touch with Ana, but when she confronted Ana about stockpiling opioids, Ana cut her off.
A former trafficker reached out to Ana, meanwhile, wanting to reconnect as friends. As soon as Ana taught herself to walk again, he pulled up outside the house and put her on Figueroa — more than 50 pounds lighter, with the ostomy bag and without her front teeth. He made plans to tattoo her neck again with his name — in the same spot where Forsythe had helped have it erased.
Life away from Fig had turned out to be both hard and complicated. Life back on Fig was hard, but simple.
On Thursday night, Armendariz stood at 70th and Figueroa in a black mesh top and pumps, her purse outfitted with a recording device. She dangled a strip of condoms from her bra strap. She knew there was only so much evidence she could gather secondhand, and at 4-foot-10, Armendariz could pass as a juvenile in the dark. Now cars were lining up for her.
“Are you OK if we do it in the car?” she asked a man in a Raiders hoodie and sweats. His Nissan Altima hummed.
“Yeah, how much is it?” he asked.
Soon after, a bald man with a beard pulled up in a beat-up car and rolled down the window.
“A blowjob, how much?”
“Do you have $80?” Armendariz asked.
“That’s expensive.”
Once they made a deal, Armendariz told each customer to wait for her around the corner, then dropped a signal to other officers that he could be followed and arrested there. She sighed. She didn’t want this petty stuff: The city attorney’s office rejected about half of the case filings against customers Armendariz caught on Figueroa, she said, and most others who were convicted ended up with probation. What she really wanted was to clinch another trafficker.
Many sergeants did not like this type of undercover operation, given the liability: Years earlier another female officer posing as a sex worker was permanently injured when a trafficker knocked her to the ground. But Armendariz’s stings included several undercover officers loitering at strategic coordinates nearby, and the operations were working. So far, every trafficker she had arrested for trying to recruit her into his stable had been convicted. One was facing 14 years.
A few months ago, Armendariz was on this same corner when a man in a flannel shirt threw his white Mercedes into reverse, rolled down the window and rattled off all the evidence she needed to prosecute him, right into her tape recorder. His street name was Double R.
“I could take care of you,” he told her. “Hair, nails, everything,” he said. He would provide for her, he promised, “as long as you do your job out here.” He said he owned strip clubs, and that he often took his stable of girls to work in Vegas. Then he jumped out of the car.
“I’m 6-5, look,” he said. “Don’t want to play with me.”
Armendariz signaled to nearby officers — she had gotten what they needed — and within minutes, a patrol car took Double R into custody. He faced up to six years in prison (though he ended up with 180 days in county jail and probation, plus an anger-management program).
Armendariz was chasing that same high tonight, pacing the corner across from a senior center and trying her hardest to look nervous. She smoothed the netting on her top and rubbed the side of her neck. Seven different traffickers came circling. One — driving a blue Mercedes — asked who she worked for and then went to drop off girls farther down the Blade.
“He’ll be back,” Armendariz texted to undercover officers who were watching from nearby. But she was wrong. They had lost him.
Just as Armendariz was about to call off the operation for the night, a trafficker pulled up in a black Camaro and jumped out, telling her to climb into the back seat, where three girls were already crammed. Armendariz signaled that she needed more time, but an undercover officer posing as a drunk on a nearby curb began to worry for her and shifted his body weight too quickly. The trafficker sensed a trap. He pulled out his phone and filmed Armendariz’s face to blast out on Instagram, warning others. “Police!” he bellowed. “Police!” He drove off.
Armendariz was burned. Back at the station, the team’s debrief was tense.
The officer who had shifted on the curb said he had thought Armendariz had forgotten the bailout signal. Several others agreed.
“He wasn’t aggressive or anything,” Armendariz told them. “Maybe it appeared that way, but it was chill — he was real poetic.”
The officers pushed back. Armendariz pressed her lips together and said nothing. Navarro stood up from his cubicle, drummed his knuckle on a filing cabinet, and spoke.
“Look, I’m not comfortable with it either,” he said to the men. Then he gestured at Armendariz. “But you have to trust your officer.”
Armendariz was irritated. She had been careful not to dwell on the dangers of this work — she had seen far too many officers miss out on felony arrests because of fear. It bothered her when the men in the unit trusted their instincts over her signals. If little girls were fending for themselves on the Blade, surely she could, too.
Saturday was the first of the month, which always meant big business. Everybody had their paychecks. Lines of cars wrapped around onto the side streets. The sunset splashed gold and purple against the panes of a laundromat. It was February, but an ice-cream truck drove through playing the tune to “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”
Ana had already worked six days straight, and tonight, everything ached. The skin around her ostomy bag stung. A kind man who had driven through each night that week and offered to pray for Ana had not shown up. Ana stood in her hot pink lingerie and seven-inch heels and started to write down a prayer in the Notes app on her cellphone. God, she wrote. I’d do anything.
At 5:40 p.m., Ana got a text message from Forsythe: Thinking of you.
She ignored it. A couple of hours later, another:
7:46 p.m.: Still thinking of you.
Ana didn’t know that Forsythe, too, was on Figueroa that night, passing out hand warmers and hotline-inscribed bracelets that Ana herself had designed. Forsythe did this work often, going block by block, waving off the threats of traffickers. Tonight she gave the girls hugs. She told them they were loved. A 77th Street Division undercover car trailed behind, keeping an eye on Forsythe and offering her a place to warm up.
Just after midnight, Officer Armendariz was out in her own undercover car looking for potential rescues. She turned onto 68th and saw the hot pink. “Youthful-looking female on Six-eight, west side of the street,” she said into the radio. Then she turned to Navarro in the driver’s seat. “Look how skinny this girl is,” she whispered. “Thin as hell.”
But as they circled the block to set up the vehicles for the rescue operation, Ana climbed into a customer’s car. When Armendariz and her officers came back around, Ana had vanished. Armendariz called a Code Alpha — for all vehicles to report back to the station and call it a night. “It’s crazy out here,” she said into the radio, but they were short-staffed. “We’re going to bring it back in.”
‘I think that girl is a minor.’
Ana rode for three blocks with the customer before he turned and took a closer look at her face. She tried to smile. The man did not like that her front teeth were missing. He pulled over and dropped her off in front of a school playground. As Ana began trudging back toward Figueroa, the undercover car that was now transporting Forsythe turned onto the same side street on its way back to the station.
Ana’s back was turned, but Forsythe had spent enough time on Figueroa to know despondent footsteps when she saw them. “I think that girl is a minor,” Forsythe said to the officer driving the car. It wasn’t typical protocol to engage with girls without an operation, but over the years, Forsythe had become a trusted expert. He pulled over at the end of the block and radioed for their last patrol car to approach Ana and check her age.
Ana did not bother to run. She knew the stop would be quick: The 77th Street Division’s vice unit did not have the capacity to apprehend girls over 18. “Code 4,” he said into the radio: Situation resolved. “She’s 19 years old.” His partner unclasped her handcuffs. She was free to go.
From the end of the block, it was too dark for Forsythe to see much, but there was something familiar about that emaciated-looking girl they were releasing. It was the funny little shimmy the girl was doing to try to keep warm. That was something her sweet Ana used to do.
Forsythe gasped. She pleaded with the officer driving her to intervene. He asked over the channel: “Is her name Ana?”
There was a long silence. The officer who had done the stop checked his notes. “Roger,” he replied into the radio, and he repeated Ana’s full name. Ana slunk away.
Within seconds, Forsythe had jumped out of the car and was taking long, calm strides toward Ana. Four other girls on the corner watched, gaping. Traffickers jumped out of cars and started yelling. Ana began to run.
“I can’t do this right now,” she screamed, rounding a corner. “Leave me alone!” Then finally: “You’re going to get me in trouble!”
But Forsythe grabbed Ana’s wrist where the handcuffs had been and pulled her in close. “Ana, look at me,” she said softly. “Ana.”
The girl would not look up. Forsythe would not let go.
“Ana, do you want to come home?”
Armendariz had heard the whole thing play out over the radio and turned the corner just in time to see Forsythe helping Ana into a police car.
“That is the most cooperative suspect I’ve seen in a while,” Navarro said to her.
“But it counts as a rescue, right, Sarge? For the log?”
They drove to the vice unit to meet Ana and Forsythe, and soon, Ana was snuggled in pink fuzzy socks, holding a new stuffed unicorn and crying into Forsythe’s chest.
“What’s new every morning?” Forsythe whispered to Ana, quoting a Bible verse.
“His mercies,” Ana replied, sniffling.
Forsythe nodded. “And so tomorrow, Ana, we start again.”
It was 2:18 in the morning, and Armendariz had one last job. She brought Ana an Oreo ice-cream sandwich, then led her and Forsythe to Interview Room 217. Ana rubbed her palms together anxiously. The room felt hot, and the fluorescent lights too bright. She was exhausted and ashamed and afraid, all at once. She did not want to talk about the past year, or the past week, or her long list of traffickers.
“Ana, I know this is something really hard,” Armendariz said gently. “But I just have to figure this piece of the puzzle out.”
Armendariz needed to get every possible detail out of Ana, if she wanted any chance of arresting her traffickers. Tomorrow would be Sunday, and Armendariz would be back on the Blade working. But there seemed to be a chance that Ana would not.
Read by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn
Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.
Emily Baumgaertner Nunn is a national health reporter for The Times, focusing on public health issues that primarily affect vulnerable communities.
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