A 15-year-old Texas girl died by suicide on Saturday, two years after she was rescued from sex trafficking, her family says.
Leticia “Letty” Serrano, a former student at Marshall Middle School in Houston, was kidnapped near her school grounds and sold to human traffickers in 2017 when she was just 13 years old, her godmother, Cynthia Rivera, told KTXH.
Letty’s father, Mariano Serrano, said after his daughter returned, she tried to run away from home multiple times to see the man who had sold her into trafficking.
“She wanted to be with him,” he said. “But she also didn’t want to hurt her family.”
Her father said Letty locked herself in a bathroom in their home early that morning of October 12, and that by the time he reached her, it was too late.
“She died in my arms,” he said.
“Letty was abducted in 2017 through a man who drugged her and trafficked her,” her godmother Rivera said.
“With the help of the community, I was able to get her back.
“The damage was already done and the road to recovery is one of the hardest things for any child to overcome without the right help.”
Rivera also claimed that the man responsible was arrested in the wake of the kidnapping and that he only spent three days in jail before his release.
She added that the man was allegedly seen with another 13-year-old child just days after the incident.
Houston Police Department Vice Division commander Jim Dale has requested that Letty’s case be reopened in wake of her death.
“She was a victim and somehow her cries fell through the cracks,” he said, adding he hoped to get more schools involved in the mass effort to stop the state’s child sex trafficking epidemic.
