To catch a trafficker: Inside the Omaha program jailing child sex offenders, empowering survivors

Editor’s note: A survivor of child sex trafficking will be referred to by a pseudonym in this story to protect her identity. 

The bust that kicked off a yearslong crackdown on Omaha’s child sex trafficking underworld started as a single name on a whiteboard in Sgt. Brett Schrage’s office. 

As they interviewed children and parents and gathered evidence, detectives used dry erase markers to fill in names and arrows until they had an elaborate web connecting suspected traffickers and underage victims.

Then, they made their first big move. In December 2020, a team of federal, state and local officers tracked down four men who would later be sentenced to a combined 97 years in prison  for selling two missing foster children, aged 16 and 17, to older men for sex.

The trafficking survivor who blew the case open — the first name on the whiteboard — initially came to police through a novel program designed to serve Omaha kids who frequently ran away from home.

But as the connection between missing reports and sex trafficking became clearer, the program created by the Omaha Police Department and child advocacy center Project Harmony took on a new goal: clamp down on the historically under-prosecuted crimes and help young survivors heal.

“It was very eye opening at how much trafficking is occurring in Omaha (and) how related it is to the very vulnerable youth population,” said OPD Detective Lisa Horton. 

Police departments and child advocates from Texas to New York are taking notice and replicating the program.

Four years on, the collaboration in Omaha has led to 37 arrests and 22 convictions on charges related to child sex trafficking. Most of those convicted will spend at least a decade in federal prison.

It has also connected about 50 confirmed survivors with detectives and advocates who help them rebuild their confidence and self-worth. 

Shayla, a teenager rescued in 2022 by Horton and her partner from a “broken down, mice-filled basement” in Omaha, said the detectives showed her more love and support than she’d received from many of her own family members. 

“If they wouldn’t have found me, I probably would have been dead by now,” Shayla said in a 2023 recorded interview with Project Harmony.

The program’s superpower is its ability to prevent more at-risk children from falling prey to sex traffickers, said Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Christina Worster.

Police and Project Harmony advocates use warning signs — like missing reports and hard drug use — to pinpoint at-risk kids. Then they intervene, offering them a trusted adult to talk to, medical and mental health care and placements into institutions like Boys Town. 

“It’s really easy to count victim recoveries,” Worster said, “but I feel like where they really excel is meeting these girls and getting involved … in their lives prior to their victimization.”

A gap in the system

When then-OPD Lt. Tracy Scherer and Project Harmony Vice President of Response Services Colleen Roth devised a plan that would later produce pioneering anti-trafficking work, they were trying to solve a different problem. 

In the mid 2010s, OPD was fielding about 3,200 missing juvenile reports a year, requiring police to spend thousands of hours tracking down and returning runaways. 

About half of the reports pertained to kids involved in the juvenile justice or child welfare systems.

For the other kids, there “was nothing in place to help serve” them, said Schrage, the OPD sergeant. Police had little choice but to take them back home — and wait for them to run away again.

OPD didn’t have the capacity to find out what was causing each of the “non-system involved” kids to continuously run away, Roth recalls. Project Harmony, a longtime partner on abuse and neglect cases, could help fill the gap.

“It was like, ‘Holy crap, what are these kids running to and what are they running from?’ We have no idea,” Roth said.

Born in 2018, the Missing Youth Services program aimed to offer frequently missing kids access to supportive advocates, professional counseling and health care.

It also opened a new door for kids to disclose abuse, neglect and other trauma-inducing experiences hiding just beneath the surface, said Project Harmony CEO Gene Klein.

Project Harmony advocates and OPD detectives Horton and Jeff Shelbourn began meeting consistently with the kids to understand their problems.

“It was almost like once they started to come and be brought through Project Harmony, we couldn’t look away from what these kids had going on,” Klein said.

As advocates and detectives built trust with the kids, they learned that some of the girls in the program were in inappropriate relationships with adults or had been made to engage in sex work while on the run, Schrage said.

Historically, sex trafficking crimes are hard to prove and prosecute because victims usually don’t come forward on their own, Schrage said. Sometimes, survivors don’t even see themselves as victims and may be initially hostile toward police.

“Policing, in a lot of ways, is you get a report and it’s a reaction to the report … but in these situations, kids aren’t reporting them,” Schrage said. “You gotta be able to build that trust, so it’s like ‘Hey, you can tell me if something more is going on.’”

For the first few cases, Schrage, Worster and the detectives used sex ads recovered from prostitution websites and information gathered from interviews to uncover several trafficking rings operating out of the same southwest Omaha motel around the same time. 

But as the law enforcement successes piled up, the number of trafficking survivors needing support grew. Traffickers build trust with kids by targeting their vulnerabilities, often offering them a place to stay, buying them things or giving them drugs before manipulating them into sexual favors or sex work, Schrage said. 

That’s why in 2021 Project Harmony added an anti-trafficking program, hiring more advocates to create support systems for survivors, Klein said. 

Today, the much-expanded missing and anti-trafficking programs operate as one, and it’s “a pretty well-oiled machine,” Schrage said. 

Officers meet with Project Harmony advocates twice a week in their shared west Omaha offices to talk about kids who frequently go missing and determine whether they’re becoming higher risk for trafficking, gang activity or other delinquent behaviors, Schrage said. If needed, they intervene and assign an advocate to meet with the kids weekly.

The vast majority of missing cases that come through the program never become trafficking cases, said Kassandra Nolasco, the program’s first bilingual advocate.

But if advocates learn of inappropriate behavior by an adult, they share that information with OPD detectives, who investigate the cases with Homeland Security. 

Advocates stick with trafficking survivors through challenging court proceedings and the turbulent road to recovery, Nolasco said.

“I want to make sure that they know that I’m going to be around regardless of what happens,” Nolasco said.

Spreading the word

When detectives found Shayla in the dark boarded-up basement, she weighed 88 pounds. She had been using meth. She reported feeling suicidal. 

Like many survivors, she initially didn’t trust Horton and Shelbourn. 

The daughter of a sexually abusive father and a mother who died by suicide, Shayla had been in and out of foster care since she was a toddler. She thought the detectives would “take me to another s***ty home where things just wouldn’t get better,” she said in an interview after the fact.

The detectives drove Shayla to Project Harmony, where advocates helped get her into Boys Town, significantly cutting down the risk of her running away again, Schrage said. There, a team of supporters helped her to stop using drugs and eventually get back into school. 

“It has helped a lot in a sense that I will graduate soon, and I never thought that would happen,” Shayla said in 2023. She dreams of a career in child welfare or law enforcement. 

Last year, a federal judge sentenced her 55-year-old abuser, Robert Kaczmarek, to 27 years in prison for production of child pornography tied to nude photos and videos he had of Shayla. 

In addition to putting traffickers behind bars, the program has seemingly begun to serve its original purpose. The number of annual missing juvenile reports made to OPD has dropped nearly 20% since 2019, according to OPD statistics provided by Project Harmony.

The program has proven popular with donors who contributed $12 million during a funding drive last year. The missing and anti-trafficking team will have a dozen advocates by the middle of the year, Klein said.

Project Harmony will debut a 50-minute documentary on its missing and anti-trafficking program at Boys Town on March 19. 

The local program has “made a splash” nationally, especially as trafficking cases start to come “free flow” to Omaha law enforcement, said Worster, the federal agent. 

Child advocacy centers in Fort Worth, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, are working with Project Harmony to replicate the program in their area. 

After returning from an Omaha meeting with Project Harmony staff, Fort Worth’s Alliance For Children began “looking at our missing youth through a similar lens and instantly had a win of locating a young child,” said CEO Julie Evans. 

“While this child and her family will never meet the team at Project Harmony, they are certainly an important piece of her recovery story,” Evans said in an email. “Their vision and willingness to guide other centers will help countless children in the years ahead.”