Postal Worker's Emotional Reunion with Teen Girl He Helped Rescue from Human Traffickers
One California girl was saved out of her nightmare when an observant postal carrier rescued her from her captors.
June 8, 2018, was a normal day for Ivan Crisostomo; he was just driving his normal delivery schedule in Sacramento.
Until he saw Crystal Allen.
“I hear this crying, this desperate crying,” he said. “I saw her hiding behind this kind of bush, kind of tree.”
The 16-year-old was sitting in someone’s front yard crying which seemed odd to the father of four.
Crisostomo said, “She started to point to her arm, saying, ‘They were putting things in me. They were putting things in me. They are coming to get me.”
That’s when he realized that she had just escaped from human traffickers.
Allen had been separated from her family for three months. She was drugged, tortured and abused during that time.
“I just cried all the time and prayed that I’d get to see my mom again,” she told Fox 40.
Until one day she worked up the nerve to jump out of the car to finally escape, grabbing her captor’s cell phone before doing so.
She immediately called her mother.
“Until she handed the phone to Ivan and we spoke with him, we had no idea what was going on,” Stacy Ohman, Allen’s mom, said. “We had no idea where she was or anything.”
Allen’s family thought they would never see her again.
Thanks to Crisostomo, that wasn’t the case.
He sat with the teen until police arrived to take her to the hospital, even reassuring her that he wouldn’t leave her side.
“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Nobody’s going to take you. I’m here for you. Don’t worry.”
The two met again on August 2, 2018. Allen wanted to thank Crisostomo again for helping her get to safety.
“Ivan himself is a hero for saving me,” she said. “Even though he doesn’t think it.”
But Crisostomo remains humble and says helping people is just a normal part of his daily duties.
“We, as mailmans, we have a duty, as a human beings, being there, knowing the people,” he said. “We have a kinda different responsibility a little bit with our neighbors and with the people we serve. That’s how I see it.”
According to the National Human Trafficking Hotline, 8,524 human trafficking cases were reported in 2017 alone. If you see any suspicious activity, call the hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733. You could save a life like Crystal Allen’s.
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