On April 8, 2022, a 15-year-old girl from North Richland Hills, Texas, visited a Dallas Mavericks game with her dad. Horrifically, when she went to the bathroom shortly before halftime, she was kidnapped and trafficked to a hotel in Oklahoma City in which she was held hostage for over a week. Fortunately, she was rescued and reunited with her parents after 11 interminable days. Now, however, the teen and her family are suing the hotel chain.As background, the teen was discovered to be missing when she didn’t return, and video footage from surveillance cameras viewed that night showed her leaving the American Airlines Center in Dallas, in which the game was being played, with a then-unknown man. That was on April 8, 2022. She then was discovered in a hotel room on April 18 after she was identified through an online advertisement.

Now, the teen and her family are suing the hotel chain in which she was trafficked. Explaining why the hotel chain must be held accountable, her lawyer, Zeke Fortenberry, said, “This girl was being SA in a hotel room multiple nights. Any time she could have been rescued from that sooner would have been better.”Continuing, Fortenberry added that the hotel staff should have noticed something was wrong, saying, “When a 40-something-year-old man walks in with a 15-year-old girl and rents multiple hotel rooms, and then there is traffic coming in and out of those rooms, those are red flags.”Fortenberry filed the lawsuit against the hotel chain on February 5, 2024, naming multiple corporations, including Dallas-based Provident Hospitality Holdings LLC and Aimbridge Hospitality, in the lawsuit. For reference, Provident Hospitality owns the Extended Stay America hotel at the Oklahoma City Airport in which the teen was trafficked./Source:theamericantribune