A Texas teen who was sex-trafficked after being kidnapped from an NBA game described the awful week of abuse she underwent, including being taken 200 miles from her home, raped, and featured in an online sex ad.
Natalee Cramer was just 15 years old when she and her father, Kyle Morris, went to a Mavericks game at the American Airlines Center in Dallas on April 8, 2022. The now-18-year-old, who acknowledged using marijuana and alcohol to deal with her anxiety, stated that she began to feel apprehensive when the basketball game began.
“I just walk around, and that’s when I caught that guy’s eye”
“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.” Cramer told her father that she was going to the bathroom, but she never returned to her seat. 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 guys drove Cramer to a house in North Texas and gave the 15-year-old marijuana, “but there was more that they had in mind,” she admits. She was confined in the house for a few days until her kidnappers turned her over to another group in Oklahoma.
Morris had reported his daughter missing to a Dallas police officer at the stadium but was informed he needed to report Cramer as a runaway to police in their hometown, 30 miles away from the game.
Cramer had previously been reported as a runaway as she fled her home for multiple reasons
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. According to the publication, the teen’s family filed a lawsuit against the Extended Stay America hotel at the Oklahoma City Airport where she was confined, alleging that personnel either failed to detect the indicators of human trafficking or turned a blind eye and ignored them. Cramer saw the day she was rescued as an answered prayer.
“I was just praying to God,” she explained. “I am exhausted. I can’t do it anymore. I need someone. “Please send someone.” On April 18, an Oklahoma City police officer saw the teen wandering outside an apartment building and asked whether she was Natalee Cramer. Cramer informed the police she had been raped. In what the teen described as a matter of minutes, eight people were caught and later sentenced for their involvement in the trafficking. US Marshals apprehended Cartagena in January 2023 and charged him with sexual assault of a child, accusing him of luring Cramer away from the Mavericks game and molesting her before transporting her to Oklahoma, WFAA reported.