“I obviously didn’t answer these questions, I ignored him and kept asking him to leave me alone.”
She says she was “terrified” to stand up and go to her car because it’s a lot easier to grab someone standing up than it is when they’re laying down. Haley also didn’t want him to know what car she drove, or somehow follow her home.
The middle-aged man told Haley he was from Waukegan, Illinois. But he spoke very broken English.
“I’m almost 99% sure he was a sex trafficker based on the questions he was asking me.”
When her friend Mandi called to tell her she was on the way, the man finally left.
“The second she called he practically ran away.”
As suspected, this isn’t the first time sketchy stuff like this has happened in the area.
After sharing her experience on Facebook, Haley was contacted by a mom whose teenage daughters were recently followed home from a local restaurant by two men:
“They pulled aside to let the men in the truck pass, but the truck stopped right next to them,” the mother explained. “The driver got out and knocked on the driver-side window, and asked them to get out of the car because he had a question for him. Then the passenger in the truck got out wearing a mask, and carrying a sledgehammer. My girls sped off, and the men chased them through a subdivision.”
Luckily the girls got away. But police later confirmed that just hours after the incident with the teens, those same men they’d described to authorities abducted and sexually assaulted a Milwaukee woman before leaving her on the side of the road.
Both men were eventually arrested in Kentucky.
Haley wants others to know that the horror stories we hear about—they’re real, and they’re happening too close for comfort.
“Please be careful ladies, if you go to the lake alone make sure someone knows where you are and bring protection! I don’t think a man has EVER made me that uncomfortable and scared for my safety.”
Know the signs— human trafficking is happening every single day. The only way we can combat it is to be educated, keep our eyes open for red flags and continue to share stories like these. They’re scary, but they’re REAL. And they could wind up saving someone else’s life.
