He called himself Ace, and he came looking for young vulnerable girls that he could sell for sex. He rode into Haverhill, Mass. Into a poor neighborhood with three-story tenements and peeling paint. Ace, however, knew enough about the girls, at least some of them. He knew the emotional and physical pain they had endured would make them prime candidates for his twisted goals.
Abuse, you see, lived in this neighborhood as well, and abuse served as an ally for Ace. He was a bodybuilder with big muscles and jet-black hair. He seemed charismatic, charming and attentive. And he was recruiting, looking for a certain type of girl who was vulnerable, poor, hopeless. Girls who would become commodities he could sell to affluent middle-aged white men, for sex. He was specifically there to target.
How could she? She was She looked younger. She would have listened to anyone who gave her even a sliver of hope, a morsel of promise. She tucked that day away, into the corner of her mind, and when things exploded at home, where she was molested by a family member on a regular basis from a young age and her mother suffered from emotional distress, preventing her from showing her daughter the love she needed, she called Ace and asked for a job, then waited for him in the gray and slush of winter, in front of the local drug store.
I was just standing there, invisible. Pawlik now lives in Raymond and has come a long way since Ace picked her up in his big black car nearly 40 years ago. She works for the New Hampshire Human Trafficking Collaborative Task Force, training medical professionals, service providers and law enforcement officials in Concord about human trafficking.
At least somewhat. I went to every college in Boston, going through the college life I would have wanted. Marino is an example that this can happen anywhere, to anyone, even to the daughter of a well-educated engineer, growing up in a middle-class setting.
