On one Friday afternoon, a 16 year-old girl was riding her bike to a friend’s house. When she had not called her parents, David and Maureen, by that evening, they knew something was wrong.

They called the police and even hired a private investigator, but days later, there was still no trace of their daughter.

“We knew the police were treating her like a runaway and they just weren’t doing much,” said Maureen. “We were trying to do all we could ourselves, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. You could go broke hiring people to help you and still not find anything.”

They eventually figured out that their daughter had been kidnapped by a gang and sold into a sex trafficking ring. This case was just one of the 7,621 reported cases of human trafficking reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2016. California, where the girl is from, leads the list of states in terms of numbers of human trafficking incidents, coming in ahead of Texas, Florida, Ohio and New York follow.

Three weeks after their daughter’s disappearance, David and Maureen called Saved in America, a San Diego-based organization that was founded by private investigator Joseph Travers. He recruited retired U.S. Navy Seals, police detectives and other specialists in the volunteer group that aims to save victims of human trafficking.

“I knew that street gangs, prison gangs and cartels took over drug trafficking in the 1980s and then they took over sex trafficking at the turn of the century,” said Travers. “When I read about [the 2009 disappearance of] Brittanee Drexel, who disappeared off the face of the planet, I just knew gangs were involved.”

The team managed to rescue David and Maureen’s daughter in Compton, California less than a week after they joined the case.

The group would like to raise awareness about how common human trafficking is in this country.

“People don’t realize this is going on in their own backyards. This isn’t in some far away country with very poor people,” says Joshua Travers, Joseph’s son, a former U.S. Marine and the group’s case manager. “This could be your next-door neighbor, your child, anyone’s child. A lot of these kids are from a middle class family in the United States. They aren’t incredibly poor or involved in abuse or bad situations [at home].”

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