Transcription
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Imagine standing before a judge, the rest of your life being determined by the decisions you made as a teenager. It wasn't an imaginary scenario for Sarah Cruzan, and the decision she made was to shoot a man dead—a man who seemed like the Devil Himself.
He first had sex with me when I was 11. I wanted it to stop. Talent, beauty, intelligence—in a different life, there's no telling how far these traits might have taken young Sarah Cruzan of Riverside, California. Instead, my home was like a war zone.
Tell me how so. My mother suffered from borderline personality disorder. There was a lot of physical violence, a lot of emotional violence, and unfortunately, even more damaging experiences. At the age of five, Sarah was molested by a babysitter. Years later, her mother's own boyfriend abused her again. The young girl told her mother, but it only made things worse. She would say to the guys, "Oh, you like my daughters? You think my daughters are more attractive than me?" There was this competition that she had created.
Despite the unimaginable horror that was her everyday life, Sarah managed to excel.
"School came to me very easy. It was an excellent outlet for me from the trouble that I was experiencing within my home."
But there's only so much one person can fight, especially a young girl with no positive role models. The absence of my father allowed me to be a little bit more vulnerable to other males that would find their way into my life, including the male who would change her life forever.
When Sarah was just 11 years old, she met 31-year-old pimp George "Gigi" Howard. Rather, he met her.
"I'm coming home from school, and a red Mustang drives up next to me. I could see my home across the street, just steps away from an entirely different future. He convinces me to get in his vehicle for ice cream—for Thrifty's ice cream. For an 11-year-old girl, what was the allure of this man in the red Mustang that I was going to get three scoops of ice cream from Thrifty's?"
At first, Sarah says Gigi was kind, nurturing her like a dad, imparting fatherly words of wisdom before taking her back to his place.
"And then he changed his clothes, and when he came out, he said, 'Stand up.' I stood up. He undressed me, and I stood there. I kind of froze. I knew that I was in a really bad situation, but I didn't run. I just stood there, and then he molested me. It's like having your soul murdered, you know? Not like a quick murder, like maybe strangled, because you're so aware of what's happening. I feel like I know what the devil looks like."
Sadly, it was only the beginning of Gigi's systematic takeover of Sarah's life. One of his partners lived right down the street; one of his limousine drivers lived right across the street from my house. He came in and developed a relationship with my mother.
"Yes, I remember him standing in the front yard and handing my mother cash. I thought, 'Okay, that was interesting,' but my mother and I didn't have a relationship. I couldn't sit down and say, 'Hey Mom, what's going on?'"
But today, Sarah is quick to share her thoughts on her mother's role in what was to come.
"I believe that my mother was one of my first traffickers."
Gigi spent the next two years breaking Sarah down physically, emotionally, and spiritually, grooming her for a life of prostitution. Then, when she was just 13, he turned her out on the streets.
"From the age of 13 to 16, I was sold."
Did you try to escape his clutches?
"Oh, of course! Like, you don't leave. There are girls that get set on fire, and it's like a message: 'If you try to leave here, I'm going to burn you.'"
So Sarah tried escaping the only way she knew.
"I would try with pills or cutting myself and was so upset when I didn't die. I tried, and I was like, 'Oh my God, I got to keep going, like really?'"
Then, when Sarah was 16, weighed down by more trauma than most people endure in a lifetime, something finally snapped.
"That day, in the evening, Gigi and I went to the movies, and from there, he took me to a hotel room. Before we went into the room, he pulled out a sex toy that he wanted to use. So we go into the room, and he offers me a drink. He stood up, and, you know, like exposed, he took his outfit off. He was in his underwear and still had his socks on. He went to go plug in the toy, and what happened next would rival any of the horror that had come before."
Coming up: "I wanted everything to stop, and it happened so fast. A split-second decision shatters multiple lives, and I got on my knees and I just said, 'I'm so sorry.'"
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