Pendergrass has also participated in individual counseling on a weekly basis in order to help her cope with the fact that she has a missing child. Pendergrass has spent countless hours attempting to retrieve her daughter from being trafficked and exploited for money,” Mims wrote in the letter. “Over the course of the last two months Ms. This letter demonstrated that BAWAR and Mims considered Pendergrass a client, just like her daughter. So, she asked Mims if he would help by writing a letter to her managers, explaining what kind of psychological stress she was under due to her daughter’s plight. She started having problems at work, as well. “There was a period when I didn’t want to live,” Pendergrass admitted. And a 2007 conviction for forging Department of Motor Vehicle documents for undocumented immigrants made it difficult for Pendergrass to find work and housing. She rarely saw her daughter and constantly worried for her safety. She explained to the Express how her friends and family were growing distant. During one session, her daughter stormed out of the room.Īround this time, Pendergrass felt like her life was falling apart. She met Mims, who agreed to try to mediate between the two, she says. She took her daughter to BAWAR’s offices in the Alameda County Family Justice Center on 27th Street in Oakland. Her mother tried to stage an intervention. But during the final months of 2012 and beginning of 2013, she began disappearing for extended periods. Pendergrass’ daughter was a runaway who regularly went missing. Now, however, Pendergrass alleges that she was sexually exploited and betrayed by one of the very people who was supposed to protect her family. Pendergrass had interacted with Mims and BAWAR several times before, and she felt that the organization, plus the police and the district attorney, would make a difference for her daughter (the Express is not using her name because she was a minor during this time of abuse). She called Patrick Mims, a community leader and coordinator of the Sexually Exploited Minors program at Bay Area Women Against Rape, an Oakland-based nonprofit that counsels trafficking survivors and their parents. In desperation, Pendergrass turned to an organization that had previously helped. She worried that Oakland police would not prioritize the capture of her pimp, and that he would return to their apartment and kill them both. “I realized we couldn’t just go home,” Pendergrass explained. Her daughter’s trafficker had used violence and intimidation to dominate their lives. Patrick Mims (center) and Marcia Blackstock (second from left) receive the 2013 Director’s Community Leadership Award from San Francisco FBI Special Agent in Charge David J. Leneka Pendergrass says she felt “taken advantage of” by one of the East Bay’s foremost anti-human-trafficking leaders.The family then fled straight to Hayward and hid at a friend’s house. But the Eastmont station was closed, so they drove to OPD’s downtown headquarters and filed a report. “The pimp knew where I lived, and he was definitely looking for her,” Pendergrass recalled during an interview last week. They sped to the Oakland Police Department’s Eastmont Substation, seeking protection. Pendergrass drove to 64th Avenue on January 7, 2014, and rescued her daughter from a stranger’s house. He has a gun.” The teenager, who frequently ran away from home - and who’d struggled since age thirteen as an exploited child in Oakland’s violent underworld of human sex trafficking - had escaped the clutches of a pimp. “Mom, I’m in somebody’s backyard and he’s looking for me. When Leneka Pendergrass’ seventeen-year-old daughter called out of the blue two years ago and pleaded for help, she immediately knew what was wrong.
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