A Texas teen who was sex-trafficked after being abducted from an NBA game revealed the horrific week of abuse she endured when she was transported 200 miles from her home, raped and featured in an online sex ad.
Natalee Cramer was only 15 when she and her dad, Kyle Morris, attended a Mavericks game at American Airlines Center in Dallas on April 8, 2022.
The now-18-year-old, who admitted she used marijuana and alcohol to cope with her anxiety, recalled that she started to feel anxious when the basketball game started.
“I was feeling good and just ready to hang out with him,” she told WFAA. “We got there, sat down in our seats … first quarter happened, and I just started getting this anxious feeling. This craving for like getting high or getting drunk.”
The teen, having left her phone behind, had made eye contact with her future abductor, Emanuel Cartagena, 33, on the arena’s concourse.
“I just walk around, and that’s when I caught that guy’s eye,” she said. “I told him, ‘I’m just really looking to smoke. Do you smoke?’”
Cartagena allegedly said he did smoke and had weed in his car, where they met a second person.
“He didn’t tell me there was anyone else there with him,” she said. “It was just him. He told me we would walk back to his car that was parked in the parking lot … in the garage … and that’s when the second guy came. They told me the weed was just in the car.”
The two men drove Cramer to a house in North Texas, where they gave the 15-year-old weed, “but there was more that they had in mind,” she admitted.
She was kept in the home for several days before her abductors handed her over to a different group in Oklahoma.
Morris had reported his daughter missing to a Dallas police officer at the arena but was told he had to report Cramer as a runaway to their hometown police, 30 miles from where the game was being held.
Cramer had previously been reported as a runaway as she fled her home for multiple reasons.
“I was running for attention,” she said. “I was running for love. I was running for drugs. I was running from things that I couldn’t control … that I wasn’t able to speak up about.”
During the terrifying 11 days she was missing, Cramer’s parents sought help from a private investigator in Houston who found the sex traffickers had posted photos of their daughter on an online sex ad.
The investigator traced Cramer to Oklahoma City.
She recalled seeing a family in the hallway of the hotel as she was under the influence being accompanied by men with assault rifles.
“I was more surprised to see a family with small children there and they looked me in the eyes and could see that all of these people were older than me and still not say anything,” Cramer said. “The dad of these little children looked at me, and he couldn’t tell at the hotel. [The man who trafficked her] had a whole rifle by his side, and the family just walked on like nothing happened.
The teen’s family filed a lawsuit against the Extended Stay America hotel at the Oklahoma City Airport where she was held, claiming the employees either failed to recognize the signs of human trafficking or turned a blind eye and ignored it, the outlet reported in February.
Cramer described the day she was rescued as an answered prayer.
“I was just praying to God,” she said. “‘I’m tired. I can’t do this anymore. I need someone. Please send someone.’”
An Oklahoma City police officer noticed the teen walking outside an apartment complex on April 18 and asked if she was Natalee Cramer.
Cramer told the officer she had been raped.
In what the teen described as a matter of minutes, eight people were arrested and later sentenced for their role in the trafficking.
US Marshals arrested Cartagena in January 2023 and charged him with sexual assault of a child, accusing him of luring Cramer away from the Mavericks game and assaulting her before bringing her to Oklahoma, WFAA reported.
A Dallas County grand jury decided not to prosecute him based on the evidence.
“I felt some guilt,” Cramer admitted. “I know that there are things I could have done to prevent this, but I know not all of the choices that were made were my choices. Part of me felt guilty, but I had to come to the fact that this is my life, and they have ruined my life. I cannot feel sorry for them because they did not feel sorry for me.”
Cramer is using her experience to warn others, saying her kidnapping wasn’t like the typical “guy with candy in the back of his van.”
“It looks like a normal conversation until it’s not. 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,” Cramer explained. “There’s no room to judge people because they can’t get out. If they could leave, they would.”
Cramer didn’t realize she was in danger until she was being raped.
“I knew I was in danger by then, but I did not know how to leave because I was scared. I could have asked for the phone, but they would have been right there. What was I supposed to do? Even if I had run, where would I go? I didn’t know where I was,” she said.
The teen, who is sober and pursuing her GED, says a lot of her running away could be blamed on mental health issues, adding she wasn’t in therapy and was self-harming.
“Being found, that was definitely God being like ‘I’m not going to give up on you; I’m not going to let you die,’” she said. “It’s also all because of my family, my boyfriend, and my dog … he saved my life too.”
Freelanews is the editorial byline of Freelanews.com, used for staff reports, news updates, press releases, and collaborative stories produced by the Freelanews Editorial Team.
