Hidden in Plain Sight
When Nicole first was taken by Sister from Ghana to Togo—Sister’s native country—the girl was given her first job: selling candy by the roadside. Then, during her first years in the United States, Nicole babysat for a young boy whom Sister claimed was hers. For an entire year, she stayed inside Sister’s house with the boy, growing envious of the other girls who got to work in the hair salon; at least they got to leave the house. More than anything, though, she wanted to go to school.
After selling candy and babysitting for a few years, “I finally realized they weren’t ever going to let me go to school,” she recalls. “It was heartbreaking.”
She trained herself to braid, and, at age 14, began working in a salon. “I taught myself on mannequin heads. I watched the other girls to learn from them, but then I was better,” she laughs.
Jacqueline, another young woman who was brought over by the traffickers, was a blood relative of Sister. Once in the United States, “I asked about school, and my aunt said, ‘There’s no school.’ I was very sad. I love school, and I want to be somebody. When she told me I couldn’t go to the school, I just crashed.”
That same day, Sister put Jacqueline to work in one of the hair-braiding salons. She was 13.
Sometimes, Nicole and Jacqueline braided the hair of girls their age. Recalls Jacqueline: “I thought, ‘Am I ever going to live like them?’ ”
Clients routinely asked the girls—especially the petite and youthful-looking Nicole—how old they were. “I always said, ‘I am 18, I am 18.’ I said to some people that I was 18 for many years. One customer, she even called me ‘18,’ ” Nicole says. As far as she knows, none of her clients contacted authorities about the apparently underage girls working in the salon.
Nicole, Jacqueline, and about 20 others turned in all of their wages to the trafficking ring made up of Sister, as well as her husband and son. Nicole began by bringing in $300 a week, then made well over $500 in a couple of years. “Everything. They got everything. I got a tip of 50 cents one time,” Nicole recounts, “and I had to give it to them.”
Along the way, their fear of their traffickers grew. Jacqueline says of Sister: “She was never a happy woman. She’d beat me up. She threw hot water on me with a spoon while she cooked. Sometimes she wouldn’t let me eat if I messed up.” The girls knew they couldn’t escape without documentation of their identities; their fraudulent passports, which Sister had obtained in order to bring the girls to the United States, had all been taken from them. Several girls later would report sexual abuse at the hands of their captors. Sister’s son, Dereck Hounakey, later said in court that he’d had sex with many of the girls, including one minor.
They longed to tell someone, but whom? Like many of Carr’s clients, they were fearful of the police because, in their home countries, the police typically are not associated with protecting and helping people. The only people they knew in the United States were the other hair braiders, the traffickers, and their clients.
“My aunt sat next to me when I talked to my parents on the phone. It was the first time I ever lied to my father,” recalls Jacqueline. “I wished I could tell him, ‘I just want to come home.’“ Nicole sums up her feelings about Sister succinctly: “She was evil. She was evil. She was evil.” Neither girl thought she would ever be free, after years of captivity. Then, early in the morning of September 6, 2007, everything changed.