Texas girl who was snatched from Dallas Mavericks game relives horror of being held by traffickers

A Texas girl who was snatched from a Dallas Mavericks game in April 2022 has shared the horrors she endured while being held captive for days by sex traffickers.

Natalee Cramer, now 18, had been attending a basketball game with her father on April 18, 2022, when she left her seat without a cell phone and told her father she was going to the bathroom — even though in reality she had the urge to smoke or drink marijuana . alcohol, which she used to cope with anxiety, she told WFAA.

“I was just walking around and I noticed this guy,” she says. ‘I said to him, “I just want to smoke. Do you smoke?”

The man allegedly replied that he smoked and had weed in his car.

Cramer was later caught on surveillance footage voluntarily leaving the American Airlines Center with two men. She wouldn’t be seen again for another ten days, when she was found in Oklahoma with a gang of sex traffickers.

The teen explained that she didn’t feel any danger when she first spoke to the Mavericks fan who offered her marijuana.

“He told me we were going to walk back to his car that was parked in the parking lot…in the garage, and then the second guy came,” Cramer said. “They told me the weed was just in the car.”

But when she got into the vehicle, Cramer said she was taken to a nearby home, where she was raped.

“It’s not like a guy with candy in the back of his van and you just get thrown in the back of the van,” she said. “It seems like a normal conversation until it isn’t.

“You don’t know you’re in danger until you’re in the middle of it, and you don’t know what to do, and you can’t get out.

“There’s no room to judge people because they can’t get out.”

Cramer eventually found herself in the parking garage that night, drugged, as her father, Kyle Morris, frantically searched for her. told CBS News.

He reported her missing to a Dallas officer working the game that night, but was told to report her as a runaway to the North Richland Hills police department – more than 30 miles away – because they lived there.

But Cramer and her family say Dallas police should have done more. They accused them of not searching for her using evidence from surveillance photos because they considered her a teenage runaway.

“I think Dallas [police] acted terribly, terribly,” she said.

“I don’t agree that people, whether you know it, are in danger or not, that they are not just runaways. My case is a perfect example of police not doing their job.

“I was walking around outside when the game was over,” Cramer noted, arguing that police should have located her that evening.

“When the game was over, everyone rushed out. They would have found me. They just weren’t looking at all,” she said, adding that she stayed in Texas — about 20 minutes from the arena — for three days before being taken to Oklahoma City.

Ultimately, Natalee’s parents were referred to a private investigator in Houston, who within minutes was able to find online sex ads with photos of Natalee and trace them to Oklahoma City.

The private investigator shared what he found with Oklahoma City police, and officers began searching for the teen, who they later discovered was being held in long-stay hotels.

A lawsuit the family filed against the companies that own and manage these hotels includes surveillance photos of Natalee in the hallways, clearly under the influence of adult men with assault rifles.

“I was surprised to see a family there with small children, and they looked into my eyes and could see that all the people were older than me and still didn’t say anything,” Cramer said.

“The father of these little kids looked at me and he couldn’t see it in the hotel.”

She went on to say that the man who trafficked her “had a whole gun at his side and the family just walked on as if nothing had happened.”

On the day she was finally rescued, Cramer said one of the traffickers punched her in the mouth.

‘My whole cheek was just scratched. My braces were like in my cheek,” she said.

Without hope, Cramer “just started praying to God.”

‘I’m tired. I can’t do this anymore. I need someone. Please send someone,” she remembers praying to God before she managed to leave her hotel room and get away from her traffickers.

As she walked out of an apartment complex later that day, a police officer drove by.

“He came up next to me and said, ‘Are you Natalee Cramer?’ and I was like, ‘Yes,'” she said.

The sex trafficking victim then told the officer she had been raped, and she was taken into the back of a police vehicle with her shoes on the seat next to her.

Eight people were arrested that day, two of whom pleaded guilty to human trafficking and child pornography. according to Dallas Express.

All were later sentenced to prison.

“I felt guilty,” Cramer admitted. “I know there are things I could have done to prevent this, but I know not all the choices I made were my choices.

“Part of me felt guilty, but I had to come to terms with the fact that this is my life, and they ruined my life. I can’t feel sorry for them because they didn’t feel sorry for me.’

Meanwhile, Dallas police finally arrested a man in connection with the case last year and charged him with sexual assault of a child.

Agents accused him of luring Natalee from the Mavericks game and assaulting her in Dallas before taking her to Oklahoma, but a grand jury declined to issue an indictment.

“I was extremely upset,” Cramer’s mother, Brooke Morris, told WFAA.

“Our attorney had additional evidence that he was trying to present to the Dallas District Attorney’s Office, and we were told flat out, in a nutshell, ‘thanks for the additional evidence, but we’re not going to present it to the grand jury again. she claimed.

Natalee added that she was not even given a chance to testify, saying her vivid memory of what happened is enough evidence.

‘I can remember everything they did. Everything they wore and everything they said and did to me.

“All three of them are guilty, and if I could see all three of them, I could point them out.”

She now says she believes “100 percent” that more needs to be done in Texas to investigate and prosecute the suspects.

“My first sex trafficking incident happened with the people at the American Airlines Center. That’s the Dallas deal,” Cramer argued. ‘That is their responsibility for what happened in their area.

“That’s not Oklahoma’s job. I was [trafficked] by Dallas men. The Dallas Police Department needs to deal with it, not the Oklahoma Police Department.”

But she said she believes her case is “at the very end of the line.”

“It doesn’t matter to them, but that’s why I feel like sharing my story will open people’s eyes to the fact that this is real,” she told CBS News.

“The police need to deal with things like this and hopefully my story will spread to people who are survivors and people who just want to support because they care.”

Still, the family has found some success, encouraging a change in the way the Dallas Police Department’s protocol regarding runaways is handled and creating an organization called Aisling to provide support and resources to survivors of sex trafficking and sexual assault.

“I’m not afraid,” Cramer said of her traffickers. ‘I’m not afraid of them. I’m not the scared person I was when I was around those people.”

If she had the chance to speak directly to her captors, Cramer said, “I would say, ‘Thank you, because you made me who I am today.’

“You made things happen in my life that made me stronger, made me more resilient.

“But I will never, I will never forgive you, and I wish you one hundred percent the worst. I wish you the worst, but I thank you.”