A teen girl who was abducted into a sex trafficking ring from a Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball game in 2022 is speaking out about the investigation and her own struggles that led to the incident.
Natalee Cramer, 18, was 15 when she went to the basketball game at American Airlines Center in April 2022 with her dad, as CrimeOnline reported. Eleven days later, with the help of a private investigator who saw photos of the girl on a sex trafficking web site, she was found in Oklahoma, where several people were arrested and have already been convicted in connection with sex trafficking.
In Dallas, however, one man was arrested, and the case was dropped when a grand jury declined to indict him, WFAA reported.
Cramer explains that she was a troubled teen in 2022 and has come a long way since.
“I was feeling good and just ready to hang out with him,” she said about that day. “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.”
She left her seat, telling her dad she was going to the bathroom. Instead she found a man she thought could provide drugs and left the arena with him.
“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.”
There was more than marijuana. Cramer says she was raped, punched, and kept high, first taken to a house about 20 minutes from the arena and later to Oklahoma. She said she doesn’t remember the trip, just being there.
Cramer’s father, Kyle Norris, reported her missing back at the arena, where police told him he’d have to file the report 30 miles away in North Richland, where they lived, and not in Dallas where she was when she disappeared.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office told KTVT that the case was closed when the grand jury declined to indict the sole person who was arrested in Dallas. Dallas Police declined to comment because Cramer was a juvenile at the time, even though she’s now speaking out publicly about the case.
“All of those people in Oklahoma are convicted,” Cramer said.
“My first sex trafficking incident was with the people at the American Airlines Center. That is Dallas’ deal,” she said. “That is their responsibility that happened in in their area. That’s not Oklahoma’s to deal with. I was [trafficked] by Dallas men. Dallas police needs to deal with it, not Oklahoma police.”
Instead, she said, Dallas police treated the case like a standard runaway, when it was anything but.
“I think Dallas [police] did horrible, horrible,” she said. “I don’t agree that people, whether you know, they are in danger’s way or not, they’re not just runaways. My case is a perfect example of cops not doing their job. I was walking around outside when the game ended.
“When the game ended, everyone was rushing outside. They would have found me. They just didn’t look at all. They would have found me,” she said.
Cramer recognizes that what happened to her came in part from choices she made, but she’s equally adamant that people understand she was 15 at the time and that things are not always clear to adults, let alone to children.
“I felt some guilt,” Cramer told WFAA. “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.”
But not entirely. Cramer told KTVT she got a dog, Gunnar, shortly after the incident, and Gunnar has helped pull her on track.
“When I got Gunnar, I was in a manic … every morning he forced me to get out, I had to take him out. I had to feed him,” said Cramer. “He brought that motivation back. … He’s a dog. He doesn’t know, but he saved my life completely.”
And her family has been supportive. They’ve started a nonprofit organization that provides resources for survivors of sex trafficking and sexual assault, Aisling — the Irish word for dream — and she sits on the board.
“There were all these groups and all these people volunteering to help her, and of course, that’s what we wanted, but when the dust settled and she’s in a treatment center, it was truly just my husband and I and our therapist,” Brooke Morris, Cramer’s mother, told WFAA. “Had we not had our relationship with God and had we not had a strong relationship with each other and an incredible therapist, we may not have made it and that would have done more damage to her.”
“For me, a lot of it was my mental health. I wasn’t in therapy. I was struggling with self-harm. I was struggling with friends. I was struggling with school. There were a lot of factors for why I ran. It doesn’t have to be family issues. It can be anything,” she said.
“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.”
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[Featured image: Natalee Cramer/KTVT screenshot]
