A young woman forced to stay in a hot car all day, every day, is suspected by local authorities of being a human trafficking victim, and a joint effort was made to get her to safety.
“It’s the first time that we’ve dealt with an international matter like this,” Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills said. “And it took all of us – Sgt. Justin Brock, Evidence Technician Janna Waddell, who has DFCS experience, other deputies, J.A.G.’s Jenny Owens, who served as interpreter, and DFCS – it took all of us hours upon hours to get this straightened out.
“And then I turned it over to the Human Exploitation and Trafficking Unit of the GBI so they can take it from there.”
An anonymous call came into the sheriff’s office on June 3, when the caller said a 14-year-old girl from Maryland was sitting in a car where the workers park at Noles’ Tree Farm & Nursery, Sills said.
“The tipster said the girl had to sit out there every day because the man who had her worked there and made her sit in the car all day, and they described the car,” Sills said.
The sheriff and deputies went to the nursery and found the car and the girl. Sills emphasized that the Noles were nothing but cooperative, helped a great deal, and were not involved in any suspected criminal activity.
They also went out in the field and picked up the worker, later identified as 39-year-old Eulalio De Leon Aldana, and brought him to the law enforcement officers.
“They said they’d heard the girl had sat out there last week, and they told her father that he couldn’t do that,” Sills explained. “They didn’t know she was back again; that was very clear.”
Owens arrived to serve as an interpreter for law enforcement investigators, as well as the teen and worker who are Guatemalan.
The girl who had been sitting in the car told them she was 16. Her father worked at Noles, and she had to wait for him every day until he got off work.
Aldana, however, reportedly told them the girl was a close friend of one of his daughter’s friends.
“And here the girl was telling me he was her daddy, and she knew his name,” Sills said. “And I said, 'That’s great. All of you all are going with me now. I’m taking her into protective custody, and I’m detaining you until I can figure out what you’re doing with this girl.'”
Aldana gave consent for the deputies to search his car. Sills said they found all of the girl’s personal belongings in there, including a citation she’d received for illegally crossing the border in Arizona.
“She’d been apprehended in 2022 by I.C.E. for illegally crossing the border in a boat, and I.C.E. had flown her to Baltimore,” Sills said. “So, I.C.E. actually had a warrant for her, and you hear that they’re flying these people secretly to a sanctuary city, and they’re actually doing this.”
Also found in the car was a school identification card from New Jersey.
“I don’t know how she got from Baltimore to New Jersey,” Sills said.
Sills said the New Jersey school officials told them the girl had left that school in October 2023 and transferred to another state. However, they never received anything from the other state’s school system requesting her education records.
School officials also provided the phone number of the girl’s guardian she’d lived with while there. The guardian was believed to be from the same Guatemalan village the girl was from, and they provided Putnam sheriff’s detectives with the girl’s mother’s phone number in Guatemala.
“And the mother said, ‘We’re poor here, I don’t want her to come home,’” Sills said. “We told her she was cohabitating with a man 23 years older than her, and she said she didn’t care because they were poor there and she’d be better off here.”
Aldana’s coworkers told authorities he had another woman he was living with, whom he’d had children with. But when he took the teen home, that woman kicked him out.
“And they’ve been staying in motels and in the car,” Sills said.
Sills called and requested that DFCS find the teen a foster home.
“But they said they had to call a lawyer to arrange a court case so they could get an order before they could take her,” Sills said. “And I said, ‘Watch this!’ I called Governor Kemp, and he took care of it. What happens to these young girls when I’m not involved?”
Aldana was arrested on a bench warrant for failure to appear in court for a traffic violation issued by the Eatonton Police Department and later released.