Airline Agent Suspicious of Teens with First Class Tickets, Cops Foresee Danger Unraveling
Denice Miracle was working her shift as an American Airlines agent when she was approached by two teenage girls. Neither had any identification, and they were traveling suspiciously light.
“I think the way they kept looking back-and-forth at each other like they weren’t really sure. And then they were texting someone on the phone, and that person was giving them answers,” Miracle told KOVR.
She took a look at the girls’ tickets and noticed that they were purchased under another person’s name. She started to get the feeling that something nefarious was going on.
“It was a first-class ticket. It was very expensive,” she explained. “I told a supervisor, ‘I’m going to call the sheriff. It just doesn’t feel right to me.’”
The police came to the airport to talk to the girls. They told Deputy Todd Sanderson that they met a man named “Drey” on Instagram.
He invited the two of them to New York to make $2,000 for a modeling and music video shoot.
The tickets were one-way, which was a massive red flag to Sanderson. To him, the whole situation looked like a classic sex trafficking plot.
“They were somewhat flippant about — ‘No, that can’t be true’ — and I said, ‘No, the airline says you have a one-way ticket, and in my belief, you’re going back there not to do the things that you think you were going to be doing.’
“And they said, ‘I wouldn’t let anything happen that I didn’t want.’ And I said, ‘Well, you probably wouldn’t have a choice in the matter,’” Sanderson recalled.
After describing the situation to the girls, who were 15 and 17, they started to grasp the fact that they made a massive mistake.
The authorities tried to find “Drey” on Instagram, but he caught onto them and deleted his profiles before they could get a lead.
Denice Miracle, the agent who initially intervened, has a name the truly suits her.
“She probably really was their miracle that day, whether they want to believe it or not,” Sanders said.
When informed of their daughters’ actions, the girls’ parents were stunned.
They had no idea that their daughters were about to fly out of state — right into a suspected sex trafficker’s hands.
The deputies from the department warn parents that this is the type of thing they have to look out for on social media. Keep track of what your kids are doing online, because there won’t always be a Miracle to stop them.
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