A trafficking pipeline

Florida foster system provides predators with easy access to vulnerable teen girls

Jayden Alexis Frisbee died last year at age 16. She had a passion for animals and music.

She left behind grieving sisters, a baby brother, her mother, and a grandmother who still can’t forgive herself for ever letting the Florida Department of Children and Families into Jayden’s life.

The state was in charge of Jayden through its privatized foster care system, and it made an inadequate, unstable parent. Jayden was shifted among 12 foster homes in a year and a half, and neighborhood sex traffickers caught up with her along the way.

She died on Jan. 11, 2021, in the bathroom of a Jacksonville Studio 6 motel.

A yearlong investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel exposed the complicity of Florida’s child welfare system in underage sex trafficking, through evidence found in government records, state and federal lawsuits, research studies, and interviews with victims and family members.

The Sun Sentinel found:

When Florida’s child welfare system takes in a girl, the odds she will be trafficked for sex increase.

Florida exploited a loophole so it could keep sending vulnerable girls to group homes, despite a federal law that discourages their use. Teen girls at those homes have been preyed on by traffickers who sometimes “shark” the block, waiting for a girl to walk to the corner store.

Young people with a history of commercial sexual exploitation run away from group homes at an alarming rate, and those runaways are even more susceptible to sex trafficking. Yet, once they’re gone, no one tries very hard to find them, and nothing in Florida law requires them to.

It’s a dangerous mix: Foster care girls and trafficking victims share many of the same vulnerabilities — a history of abuse or exploitation, instability at home, insufficient parenting and emotional fragility.

Because there aren’t enough friends, relatives or foster home families who can care for teenagers, many of them are placed in institutional group homes staffed by employees. Those group homes are sometimes placed in unsafe neighborhoods where real estate is cheaper, and where traffickers are right outside.

“They’re looking for girls who no one’s looking out for, and that is pretty much a description of girls in foster care,” said Joan Reid, a University of South Florida researcher and associate professor who has documented the connection between foster care and child sex trafficking.

Florida is notorious for its rampant sex trafficking and is a tourist state packed with hotels, the top venue for this crime.

With growing attention to the issue, reports of child sex trafficking to the Florida Abuse Hotline have increased in recent years, hitting 3,182 last year, with the highest numbers in Broward, MiamiDade and Orange counties, in that order.

But identifying who is responsible for allowing foster children to fall into trafficking is a challenge, Reid said. That’s because the Florida Legislature in 1998 voted to privatize the foster care system, leaving the care of children in the hands of contractors. In Broward and Palm Beach counties, that contractor is ChildNet Inc.; in Miami-Dade, it’s Citrus Family Care Network; and in Orange County, it’s Embrace Families CBC. They, in turn, hire subcontractors to operate group homes.

DCF deputy chief of staff Mallory McManus told the Sun Sentinel that Florida “has made tremendous strides in reducing the number of children in group care,” and said it would be unfair to blame the foster care system for this problem.

“It is not solely the fact that the child is in foster care that raises their vulnerability to become a victim of human trafficking — rather the abuse or neglect that led them into state’s care,” McManus said in an email.

Before privatization, the Department of Children and Families frequently made headlines over cases of neglected, abused or missing children. Privatization didn’t fix the problem, child advocates say, but deflected blame away from the state.

Whether run by DCF directly or private contractors, Florida’s foster care system has been failing young people for years, said Robert Latham, associate director of the Children & Youth Law Clinic at the University of Miami.

“They should get out of the business of trying to care for teenagers,” Latham told the Sun Sentinel. “They’re horrible at it.”

‘A bad feeling’

Child welfare workers intervened in Jayden Frisbee’s life when she was 5 years old. Both her parents were fighting addictions to painkillers, so her grandmother, Glenda Usher, took in Jayden and her two younger sisters.

Usher told the Sun Sentinel that she turned to DCF for help when Jayden’s anger issues flared at age 14.

“I called the caseworker myself, trying to get help for Jayden,” Usher said. “I felt she was getting out of control for me.”

The middle schooler was placed in an institutional group home for three weeks, and then a family-style foster home in a high-crime neighborhood in Jacksonville, her grandmother said, and she started using drugs. Jayden’s family believes she met the men who trafficked her when she walked to a nearby store.

“The foster system failed her miserably,” Usher said.

Jayden’s mother, Chrissy Frisbee Morales, told the Sun Sentinel she doesn’t believe her daughter would have been trafficked had she not been placed in the foster system. DCF officials declined to comment on Jayden’s history, citing confidentiality laws.

“None of, like, the drugs and the sex trafficking, none of that happened until they put her in the first foster home,” Frisbee Morales said.

Jayden was in a special group home for trafficked youth when she ran away a final time, records show. It was five days before Christmas 2020, and Frisbee Morales said Jayden wanted to come home for the holiday.

On a Monday afternoon three weeks later, a 911 call came in from a 37-yearold, unemployed man who was staying in Room 331 of a Studio 6 on Philips Highway in Jacksonville. He told the police he’d met a girl at a gas station at midnight and she was on drugs with nowhere to stay. It was cold out. He offered his hotel room, and he said she slept on the floor.

She was moaning, and “out of touch with reality,” he told police. He asked her to leave in the morning, but she was still moaning and said she was tired. He left, and when he returned, she was dead.

Even though she was a child who had run away from a state-funded foster home in a nearby county, police couldn’t figure out who she was, and described her in reports as an adult. She had no identification and the man she was with didn’t know her name.

For more than a month, Jayden’s body lay in the Duval County morgue while Chrissy Frisbee Morales searched for her missing daughter.

“I just had a horrible feeling,” she said.

Complicity of the state

Documents show that the state has been aware for years that girls in group foster homes are specifically targeted by sex traffickers.

Though the number of children placed in foster care, including group homes, has declined in Florida over the past decade, hundreds of teenagers are still placed in such homes each year.

In September of 2022, 29% of the teenagers in Florida foster care were in group homes, according to DCF reports. The numbers were even higher in ChildNet’s territory of Broward and Palm Beach counties — 36%. In neighboring MiamiDade County, 19% of teens were in group homes. In Embrace Families CBC territory of Orange, Osceola and Seminole counties, it was 31%.

Broward County Public Defender Gordon Weekes reported what he considered “unsafe” and “abusive” conditions in a bluntly worded 2014 letter to DCF after he visited several group homes in Broward County. His letter to the head of DCF alleged that child-welfare workers

knew girls in the group homes were targeted by sex traffickers, “yet little has [been] done to address the traffic recruiter that prowls the area seeking out vulnerable girls in foster care as prey.”

“Knowingly placing highly vulnerable foster care girls in such an environment without protection is tantamount to state-sponsored human trafficking, and it must be stopped,” Weekes wrote.

In recent interviews with the Sun Sentinel, Weekes described a culture that allowed underage girls to stay out until 2 a.m. and return with their hair or nails done, or carrying unexplained expensive items — and neither the staff nor the police asked many questions.

“It was implicit that they knew, and they weren’t gonna ask, and the young ladies knew and they weren’t going to tell,” Weekes told the Sun Sentinel.

DCF deputy communications director Laura Walthall said Florida’s 249 group homes are not the first preference for placing foster children. “The primary goal is to place children in a family-like setting where all of their needs can be met,” Walthall said in an email.

But as of Oct. 21, there were only 18 family foster homes in the entire state that are approved to care for a trafficking victim.

Walthall and McManus emphasized that three-fourths of Florida’s child trafficking cases are children who were not in foster care.

“Traffickers target the vulnerabilities of both community children and children in the dependency system,” Walthall said in an email. “In recent years, physical proximity to traffickers has proved less important in recruiting than access to social media.”

The latest annual report on trafficked Florida foster children, by the state Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, found that 21% of the 377 verified child trafficking victims in 2021 were in DCF foster care.

Weekes sent his letter to DCF eight years ago, but the state still oversees a system that provides traffickers with ideal targets.

“Group homes create an unregulated environment where children can literally walk out and meet a stranger across the street — a perfect hunting ground for traffickers,” said Justin Grosz, a partner of Kelley Kronenberg law firm and co-founder of Justice for Kids, a division of the firm.

In October, Grosz, a former Broward County prosecutor, filed a lawsuit against ChildNet and several of its contractors on

behalf of a girl who entered foster care at age 12, and was trafficked by men in the community during her years in state care.

“Group homes within Florida’s child welfare system have been an open market for human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of minor children for far too long,” the lawsuit claims.

ChildNet CEO Larry Rein, through Chief Legal Officer Jason Tracey, declined to comment on the lawsuit and this report because the case is pending.

The suit alleges the girl experienced years of inadequate supervision and mistreatment at group homes. When she was 14, the lawsuit says, she used her ChildNet staff advocate’s cell phone to connect with a man who wanted to pay her for sex. The advocate “was aware that she was involved in human trafficking and recruiting other girls,” the suit claims.

Even after a court in June 2018 ordered the girl placed in a group home for trafficking victims, the lawsuit says, ChildNet left her in a regular group home for months, although staff suspected trafficking was occurring “on or near the grounds” of the home.

The teen ran away for six months and, when she resurfaced in May 2019, was finally placed at Images of Glory in Orange County, one of the handful of “safe houses” for verified trafficking victims. She had been in the foster care system for more than three years with evidence of repeated sex trafficking.

A few months later, she was sent to the ARRIS Fort Lauderdale group home on Northeast Third Avenue, just north of Sunrise Boulevard. The home, run by the Agency for Community Treatment Services, or ACTS, was one of those Weekes called out in his letter to DCF.

At the ARRIS home, the girl was questioned by FBI agents over “allegations that she had recruited other girls into the world of human trafficking.”

Within months, at age 17, she got pregnant. The father was a man she encountered outside that Fort Lauderdale group home. He was 39.

ACTS officials declined comment for this report, citing Grosz’s litigation.

MIKE STOCKER/SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL Two foster care group homes in Fort Lauderdale run by the Agency for Community Treatment Services accounted for a third of the missing person reports in the entire city of Fort Lauderdale from 2017 to 2021. A week after reporters visited the homes in spring 2022, a 14-year-old girl was raped at knifepoint in the backyard.

GLENDA USHER/COURTESY Jayden Alexis Frisbee died in 2021 just after her 16th birthday after running away from a group home for trafficked foster girls.

MIKE STOCKER/SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL “Knowingly placing highly vulnerable foster care girls in such an environment without protection is tantamount to state-sponsored human trafficking, and it must be stopped,” Broward County Public Defender Gordon Weekes wrote in a letter to the head of the Florida Department of Children and Families in 2014.

CHRISSY FRISBEE MORALES/COURTESY Chrissy Frisbee Morales, left, said she doesn’t believe her daughter Jayden Frisbee would have been snared by sex traffickers if she had never been put into the state’s foster system.

GLENDA USHER/COURTESY Glenda Usher, left, with her granddaughter Jayden Frisbee, who died at age 16 of an overdose after falling into the hands of a sex trafficker.