The woman turned up at a Laramie truck stop with nothing but the clothes on her back. No luggage, no purse. No way to identify her let alone the means to pay for a bus ticket or food.
After hitching several rides along Interstate 80, she had randomly landed in Wyoming with a hollowed-out look in her eyes.
Something in her demeanor triggered alarm bells for staff that knew to contact Justin Scott and the volunteers at his anti-human trafficking nonprofit who jumped into help, finding her a place to stay and immediate mental health and medical care.
Scott would later learn that the woman had been sex-trafficked by members of a satanic cult — one that, beyond selling her, had subjected her to the full range of horrors their rituals entailed.
The woman attempted to escape on multiple occasions, but had always been ensnarled and brought back.
Finally, she found freedom in Wyoming, but it would take Scott nearly a month to place her in a facility out of state equipped to address her many complicated issues.
This was one of the first trafficking survivors Scott and his group helped when they first began their anti-human trafficking efforts nearly five years ago under the nonprofit Albany Advisory Council on Trafficking.
The group has since reorganized under Frontline Response, an Atlanta-based group focused on providing a full range of services to homeless and trafficked people, with Scott heading up the newly formed Frontline Response West.
Along with being one of the first survivors assisted by group, the woman also is the one Scott remembers the most mainly because of her fortitude and will to survive despite what she’d been through.
He declined to provide details about her age, where she’d come from or had been sent for care for the sake of her safety.
But the woman left an impression on Scott and remains a steady source of inspiration as he continues efforts to expand resources in Wyoming.
“’Inspiring’ is a hard word to comprehend when you’re in this line of work,” he said. “It’s complicated, but just the amount of struggle and torment that survivors go through gives me strength to do more and serve them the best way we can.”
An Ask From A Pastor
It’s safe to say Scott didn’t see his life playing out this way.
At the time, he was still fighting his own uphill battle after surviving debilitating injuries in a high-speed chase in 2016 that abruptly ended his law enforcement career when he was 36.
His patrol car slid on ice and smashed the eluding driver head-on.
Scott absorbed the brunt of the crash, sustaining a traumatic brain injury that also broke his hip and back in three places.
That in itself had thrown a huge curveball for the former Converse County undersheriff and search and rescue professional who not only found himself out of a job, but facing nearly a decade of recovery.
During that time, Scott and his family moved to Laramie, where he went back to college and earned a degree. As a former first responder, he was edgy to serve but not sure what that meant.
The answer came in the form of a request from his pastor, Jason Ricks at Emmaus Road Community Church.
Knowing Scott’s background, Ricks reached out to ask if he’d pick up anti-human trafficking efforts inspired by former Laramie resident Ashleigh Chapman.
Chapman, who has since returned to her hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, is a human rights attorney and leading national anti-human trafficking expert.
She founded a company offering education, training and anti-human trafficking tools and who was recognized as USA Today’s Woman of the Year for Wyoming in 2022 for her work.
At his pastor’s request, Scott launched the Albany Advisory Council on Trafficking in January 2021 with the goal of providing education and training public.
This was a huge learning curve for Scott.
Though he’d been in law enforcement for 14 years and had plenty of training in search and rescue and finding missing people, he knew nothing about human trafficking.
As a law-and-order guy, Scott was used to going after bad guys, but had little training in tending to victims.
Shifting that paradigm to focus on victims — and respecting their decision on whether they choose to report their traffickers — admittedly took some work on his part.
Aligning Forces
The first thing Scott did was seek out other groups in the state doing the same type of work, which led him to Terri Markham, co-founder and executive director of Uprising in Sheridan.
Uprising is an anti-human trafficking nonprofit that provides instruction and training to teens, parents, residents, health care professionals and law enforcement, among other groups.
Markham was coincidentally conducting a training in Laramie that week, so Scott was able to connect with her in person.
From there, the two forged a strong working relationship.
Scott has since allied with Markham and her team to help plan Uprising’s annual Greater Rockies Immersive Training conference, which was held in April in Billings, and is also a member of the state’s human trafficking task force along with Markham.
Scott soon realized that beyond he and Markham, there were very few — if any — other anti-human trafficking groups in the state doing this work and no one who was providing trafficking survivors with direct services and after care.
He and his group saw an opportunity to step in to offer comprehensive care along with prevention and training.
Now, Frontline Response West can offer temporary housing for survivors while addressing immediate needs including food, clothing, counseling and medicate care while they find more permanent placement out of state.
The range of their needs can be vast, Scott said, from immediate care to long-term assistance like therapy and job training and education to give them skills to enter the workforce.
Their needs vary widely from one person to the next depending on their particular situation, Scott said, but on average each requires about two years at least of services to help get them back on their feet.
The nonprofit has an office in Laramie with about 15 active volunteers ranging from counselors, teachers, retired emergency room nurses and law enforcement officers. Frontline Response West also has a statewide number that people can call to report trafficking and for immediate help.
Scott estimates that he and his group have served about 30 survivors who’ve come to them through various channels like domestic violence shelters, law enforcement or tips from staff at truck stops or other venues.
No Way To Gauge Real Situation
In his experience, so far all of the survivors aided by his group have been adult women, many from other states.
Typically, they are escaping their sex traffickers, many of whom are boyfriends, husbands, intimate partners or family, Scott said.
Many are from out of state who, like the satanic cult member survivor, have landed in Wyoming on one of its three major interstates.
The survivors they help are not necessarily indicative of the most prevalent type of trafficking in Wyoming, which is familial sex trafficking or labor trafficking, Scott said.
That said, it’s almost impossible to get a read on the prevalence of human trafficking in Wyoming in general because the available numbers do not reflect the reality on the ground.
In terms of arrests, Wyoming has prosecuted few on a state level because most trafficking cases are prosecuted on the federal level, said Cara Chambers, director of the Division of Victim Services at the Wyoming Attorney General’s Office.
Despite having human trafficking laws in the books since 2013, the last state in the nation to do so, Chambers can’t recall any statewide trafficking convictions.
Instead, in terms of familial sex trafficking, many of these cases are prosecuted under child abuse and neglect statutes in cases involving children.
Other data includes the number of calls to hotlines such as the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Its most recent report in 2024 counted 29 contacts to the hotline from Wyoming.
These included 14 calls, seven text messages, five online chats and three other types of contact.
Of those who called, nine involved labor trafficking situations and three were sex trafficking. Overall, 17 cases were identified in 2024 involving 24 victims, according to 2024 data.
Building First Safe House in State
Regardless of concrete numbers, Scott said there’s enough demand in Wyoming to support building the first human trafficking safe house in Wyoming.
His group is raising money to build a facility that would provide resources along with housing to help trafficking victims transition back into productive lives.
It now houses survivors at hotels or Airbnbs, which is less than ideal, Scott said.
When it comes to trafficking-specific resources like safe houses, Wyoming is at the bottom of the list with Alaska, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia, according to a 2023 report by the national nonprofit Safe House Project.
Scott would like to see that change, pointing out the unique needs and struggles of human trafficking survivors in particular and a real need for resources in a rural state like Wyoming.
“Human trafficking hides very well in a large state with a low population,” he said. “You have lots of pockets to blend in to hide and keep things behind closed doors in rural settings.”
Along with helping trafficking survivors brought across state lines, Scott and his group are concerned about what people in Wyoming might be suffering.
“They are fighters,” Scott said. “Just the array of emotions and the mental health struggles of being tormented, manipulated and everything in between — it’s really a difficult thing to even comprehend.”
He’s witnessed the capabilities of these survivors when they’re able to flee their terrible situations and are given assistance to help get them back on their feet, he said.
“They get to be moms, wives, employees, business owners or whatever the case may be,” he said. “That’s been my driving force to be able to help them do that.”
Along with procuring resources at home, Scott is taking the fight abroad.
He’s also raising money to go to the Republic of Congo in July as part of a two-week “Cowboy in the Congo” initiative to support the physical and mental recovery of child soldiers who have been sexually exploited and forced to commit horrific acts.
Five years ago, he couldn’t fathom seeing himself at the forefront of the fight against human trafficking, but now here, this former Wyoming cop is all in.
“I think it’s been building up over time, this drive to serve and fulfill my purpose,” he said. “I just want to keep doing more.”
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
