In Plain Sight
Djena was barely ten years old when she flew alone from her home country of Guinea to Dallas, Texas, in January of 2000. On the plane, a flight attendant gave her cookies and a toy. After she landed, airline staff escorted her out to meet Mohamed Toure and Denise Cros-Toure, a Guinean couple, who, along with their children, were waiting for her. Mohamed explained that Djena was a family member from Guinea whom they were taking in. Djena believed him. Then the Toures drove her back to their house, in Southlake, a suburb near Dallas. It was a two-story brick mansion with a large front lawn and a back-yard pool; the neighborhood was dotted with oak trees, and the nighttime stillness was broken only by the occasional thud of acorns falling on rooftops.
Djena lived with the Toures for sixteen years. During this time, her belief that they considered her one of their own gradually eroded, like a riverbank worn down by steady currents. There were five other kids in the house: Mohamed and Denise’s three sons and two daughters. They all went to school. Djena did not. She worked from morning to night, cleaning and cooking meals for the family even though she wasn’t allowed to eat alongside them, except on special occasions. Denise and Mohamed bought new clothing for the other children, whereas Djena was given ratty hand-me-downs—even her bras were Denise’s castoffs. Everyone else in the house had their own bed. Djena slept on a mattress on the floor.
And then there were the beatings. When Djena neglected to do a chore, Denise would use a belt or a power cord to whip Djena, leaving her covered in bruises. Once, Denise yanked an earring out of Djena’s left ear, tearing the lobe. As Djena got older, she made attempts to resist the beatings—sometimes grabbing the belt or the cord from Denise’s hands—and so Denise enlisted Mohamed’s help. He once pinned Djena down on the floor and sat on her back, allowing Denise to hit her unhindered.
It wasn’t until Djena was in her early twenties that she finally confronted the truth: she had never been a part of the family. She was an unpaid servant in the Toures’ home. Denise would tell her as much, yelling at Djena for the slightest infraction, such as leaving out a spoon while tidying up the kitchen. “You’re my slave,” Denise said. “You are here to do a job!”
Djena had no choice in coming to America, or in any of the life decisions that preceded it. In Guinea, it is common for wealthy families to take in young girls from poor homes as live-in servants. Djena grew up in Mandiana, a rural town in the eastern part of the country. Djena’s parents were farmers. The family lived in a windowless hut with a thatched roof. Djena’s father, who had the title of chief hunter in the town, was a loyal aide to Marcel Cros, a senior official in the government of Ahmed Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first President. He helped Cros with political campaigns in the village, and he travelled to Conakry, the country’s capital, whenever Cros needed him.
When Djena was roughly eight years old, her father drove her from their town to the Cros family residence in Conakry, more than four hundred miles away. Her mother, who was unwilling to give Djena up, had hidden her for three days to try and stop her from being taken. Djena remembered her mother crying as her father drove her away. When they arrived at the house in Conakry, Djena learned that her new job was to care for one of the Croses’ daughters, who was blind. Djena shared a room with two older girls who also worked for the family: one did laundry, and the other helped with chores around the house.
Not long after, Marcel Cros told Djena’s father that he was sending Djena to the United States to live with his older daughter, Denise, and her husband, Mohamed, who was Ahmed Sékou Touré’s son. Djena’s father was in no position to challenge this decision: more than a decade later, he would explain that, by giving his daughter to Cros, he had given Cros the right to decide her future. Djena was too young to understand that the ownership of her life was being transferred. Cros set up an appointment for her to get a temporary U.S. visa; all that Djena would remember from the process was that her eyes hurt from the flash of the camera when she was photographed.
There’s a term for what was happening to Djena, even if no one in her life used it. Human trafficking, sometimes referred to as modern-day slavery, is the exploitation of people for commercial sex or labor. There is no reliable estimate of how many people are trafficked into the U.S. every year, since the crime is largely invisible, but the National Human Trafficking Hotline has nonetheless identified more than two hundred and eighteen thousand victims since its inception, in 2007. Many trafficked individuals are smuggled into the country illegally, and yet there are others who arrive, as Djena did, with a visa and a name to ask for at the airport.
The Jeffrey Epstein case and films such as “Sound of Freedom”—the 2023 movie about a mission to rescue children from sex traffickers in Colombia—have brought increased attention to the crime of sex trafficking. But, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the majority of trafficking victims—seventy-seven per cent—are forced into labor. In the U.S., most of these labor-trafficking victims are immigrants working in a commercial enterprise, such as a hotel or a beauty salon, for little to no pay. In 2024, the owner of Stash’s Pizza, a restaurant chain in Massachusetts, was convicted of forced labor after an investigation found that he had kept his undocumented workers on the job for fourteen or more hours a day, and threatened to call immigration authorities if they dared to leave. Last year, federal and local agents raided Wellmade Industries, a flooring manufacturer in Georgia, and found dozens of Chinese nationals whom prosecutors say had been recruited through a temporary-visa program, after being promised high wages, and whose travel documents had been confiscated upon arrival. Other labor-trafficking victims have been forced into domestic servitude: often as maids or nannies, in private homes. These cases can be the hardest to detect.
Initially, when Djena got to the States, she was tasked with taking care of Denise and Mohamed’s youngest child, Timou, who was not yet two years old. Djena bottle-fed him and kept him entertained. She also helped in the kitchen, cleaning up after Denise had finished making dinner. Over the years, her duties expanded. She would wake up at 6:30 A.M., make the other children’s beds and tidy up their rooms, and then spend the rest of the day doing housework. Denise would send her to the grocery store, and Djena, who couldn’t read, learned to shop by the look of things—the symbol on a label, the color of a package. Years later, a neighbor would recall being surprised by what seemed like an incongruous sight in an affluent suburban neighborhood like Southlake: a little girl dressed in a head scarf and faded, ill-fitting clothes, trudging down the street carrying multiple bags of groceries, her eyes cast downward.
Denise and Mohamed told friends that Djena was their niece—rescued, they said, from poverty in Guinea—and they were gentle with her in front of visitors. In private, they were cruel. Once, Denise took Djena into the back yard and hosed her down with cold water, as one might a dog, saying that she smelled bad. There were subtler humiliations, too. When Djena first got her period, Denise scolded her for using a sanitary pad that she’d found in the house without first asking permission.
In a family where hugs and other displays of physical affection were common, Djena was hardly ever touched, unless she was being disciplined. The kids would tell her that she wasn’t pretty and that she would never find a boyfriend. The only warmth she received came from Rema, the youngest Toure daughter—born after Djena arrived—who once gave her a birthday card. The Toures’ eldest daughter, Saran, who was a few years younger than Djena, was generally hostile. For a while, Djena kept a bin with her clothes in Saran’s closet, until Saran threw it into the hallway, angry at Djena for forgetting to close her bedroom door. Djena moved the bin to the garage.
Sometimes Denise would punish Djena by banishing her from the house, and Djena would seek refuge at a local park, where there was a covered bench that she could sleep on if needed. In November, 2011, after Denise got upset that Djena wasn’t doing enough to help the kids get ready for school, Djena slept in the park for a week. The nights grew so chilly that Djena would go to a public rest room and use a hand dryer to warm herself. When the Toures found her—Timou went on a run and spotted Djena at the park—she was reluctant to return. “I told them I wasn’t going back,” Djena later recalled, though, ultimately, she relented. It was too cold to continue sleeping outside, and there was nowhere else for her to go.
Although Djena wasn’t literally trapped in the Toures’ home, she was trapped by her circumstances. Djena came to the U.S. knowing no English; she had grown up speaking Malinke and French. Over time, she learned to speak English by listening—to the Toures, who switched between French and English at home, and to the television, which she watched after finishing her housework. She taught herself to read using a copy of “Hooked on Phonics” that Denise had been using with the younger children, and which Djena kept hidden under Rema’s bed. At one point, Denise found the book and forced Djena to return it, but Djena got hold of it again, and used it to make flash cards. She taught herself to ride a bike, too, even though she didn’t have one. At night, after taking out the trash, she would grab one of the Toure kids’ bikes and take it for a quick ride.
For years, Djena had almost no contact with anyone outside the Toure household. That changed in the mid- to late two-thousands, when she began walking Timou and Rema to school and encountering other children and their parents. While accompanying the Toure kids to a local track-and-field program, she met Anthony Meehan, one of Saran’s classmates. Meehan, a gay Black fourteen-year-old, was accustomed to isolation; from Djena’s bearing, he sensed something similar in her experience. “Anyone who’s by themselves, I like to talk to them, because I was bullied in high school,” he explained later. He saw Djena standing alone and introduced himself. She was guarded at first, but, as the program went on, they eventually became friends.
Meehan’s family soon moved to the Toures’ neighborhood, and the friendship deepened. Djena was allowed to go out in the neighborhood, and she and Meehan often went running together. Meehan would sometimes help Djena with her chores and her yard work. Late at night, after Djena put Rema to bed, she and Meehan would watch “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and other reality-television shows.
Spending time in the Toures’ house, Meehan became aware of how poorly Djena was treated. He noticed that her mattress didn’t even have a sheet on it. Her shower caddy sat beside her bed instead of in the bathroom. An aspiring fashion designer, Meehan paid special attention to clothing and appearance, and he found it jarring that Djena was often dressed in clothes handed down from the boys. “Every single week, Saran would come to school with a different hair style,” he later said. “I would see Rema running with a new braid in, something new, extensions, whatever.” Djena’s hair was always unkempt. The only hair care she had ever had, it turned out, was in the form of a punishment, years earlier, when Mohamed had used electric clippers to shave Djena’s head.
“Why are you working for free?” Meehan asked her one day. He said that he got paid for doing chores at home. Rema did, too. “You are doing everything. You’re not getting paid. Why is that?”
“I don’t know,” Djena said. “Isn’t this normal to live my life like this?”
Meehan told her that it wasn’t. He also told her something Denise had said to his mother—that Djena would have been raped and murdered had she stayed in Guinea. When Djena heard this, she broke down crying. Seeing her life through Meehan’s eyes awakened something in her. She told Meehan that she wanted to run away.
This didn’t seem like a good idea, though, because Djena didn’t have legal status in the United States. Her visa had expired within months of her arrival, and she didn’t have access to her passport, which was in Mohamed and Denise’s possession. “If you run away, you will get picked up by the cops and arrested in a heartbeat,” Meehan told her. He promised to help her once he became a successful fashion designer. “When I have money to do what I need to do and get a lawyer and do all of that, I will get you out of this situation,” he said.
Djena had also grown close to a neighbor named Mary Thomson, whose children attended Rema’s school. They fell into the habit of talking on their walks to school and back—Djena with Rema, Thomson with her kids. Thomson sometimes paid Djena to babysit, which Denise consented to; with the money she earned, Djena bought a Kindle and used it to set up accounts on Facebook and Instagram, where she would occasionally post selfies or pictures of meals she’d made. When Thomson went through a difficult divorce, in 2014, Djena would often check in on her, showing up at her door with food. The kindness flowed the other way, too: Thomson gave Djena her old athletic clothes and Nike shoes. “This home is the only light for me,” Djena told Thomson, during one of her visits.
The evening when Djena reached her breaking point began like so many others. One day in June, 2016, Denise returned from a hair appointment to discover that Djena had not yet gotten dinner ready. She had Mohamed call up to Djena, who was upstairs folding laundry in Rema’s room. Djena came out of the room and insisted that she had, in fact, pulled out some items for dinner. The sound of her raised voice—defiant, unwilling—caught Denise’s attention.
Denise ascended the stairs, yelling at Djena all the way up, then grabbed Djena by the collar and began hitting her. Djena broke free and retreated into Rema’s room. She told Rema that she was tired of being abused and that she was leaving. Denise attacked Djena again, beating her until Mohamed and their eldest son, Ahmed, pulled her off. Denise went downstairs and announced that she was going to call the police. When Ahmed suggested that this was a bad idea, since Denise was the one who had been violent, Denise began cursing at him.
Djena got her backpack and climbed out through the bathroom window, on the second floor. She slept at the park for two nights. On the third day, she reached out to Thomson, first through the Facebook Messenger app on her Kindle, using the free Wi-Fi at a Starbucks, and then by calling Thomson from a phone that she’d borrowed from someone at a local middle school. Thomson didn’t pick up, so Djena left a voice mail. “Hey, Mary, it’s Djena,” she said, explaining that she was at the middle school. “Can you come pick me up here?”
Djena stayed at Thomson’s house for a week. Then she sought out another neighbor, Mahshid Golbarani, who took her in for several more days. Golbarani, who was friends with Denise, was shocked to hear Djena’s account of her servitude in the Toure household. Denise had told Golbarani, years earlier, that Djena was her niece whose parents were dead, and that she had finished high school back in Guinea. Golbarani asked Djena if she wanted to file a report to the police, or contact a nonprofit. But Djena was reluctant to escalate the situation, and she said that Golbarani should just bring her back to the Toures’ house.
Golbarani did drive Djena back—and confronted Denise and Mohamed when she got there. Denise was indignant. The idea that she had hit Djena was absurd, Denise said; after all, Djena was bigger and stronger than she was. Djena stood silently nearby while Denise spoke, suppressing the urge to contradict Denise’s lies.
After Golbarani left, Denise turned on Djena. Sensing what was coming, Djena reached into her pocket for an iPod Touch that she had bought from Timou for twenty dollars. She switched on the Record function.
Denise told her to get out of the house. Djena said that she wanted to leave, but that Denise would have to send her back to Guinea.
“Send you back? We’re not sending you back,” Denise said. She launched into a tirade, alternating between English and French. “Go live in the park! If you get killed, I don’t give a shit, I don’t know you. If you get raped, I don’t care.” She insisted that the family didn’t owe Djena anything, and that she was free to leave if she wanted. “It would cost me two thousand dollars to get you on an airplane, it would cost me more than a thousand to get you a passport,” Denise said. “You think I’m going to waste my money on you? I’ll do it when I feel like it, when I have the money.”
Djena’s life in the Toure residence became more difficult than it had ever been. Denise banned her from leaving the house, and yelled at her constantly, reminding her that she was a servant. “You need to be working in this house,” Denise told her, in another rant that Djena recorded with the iPod. “You came for that. I’m going to put you on the plane. Before you do that, my house needs to be cleaned. You start. You’re not going anywhere.”
The daily abuse convinced Djena that she had no choice but to escape, this time for good. She didn’t want to burden Thomson again, since she was still dealing with her divorce. She thought instead of Arneta Shams, a real-estate agent who had once been friends with Denise, until the two had a falling out after Denise failed to repay a loan. On one of Shams’s last visits to the Toures’ house, as her friendship with Denise was souring, Shams had given Djena her number, telling her to call if she ever needed anything.
Djena again reached out over Facebook Messenger. “Sorry Miss shams for bothering you,” she wrote. “I need to Talk to you can I meet you tomorrow Morning round 7:00 or 8:00 please let me no think you.”
“Hi Honey,” Shams replied. “You are not bothering me.” That afternoon, Djena sneaked out of the house to meet Shams at the neighborhood Starbucks.
Djena explained how intolerable her situation had become: she had been feeling so hopeless that she would go to bed at night and pray that she wouldn’t wake up in the morning.
Shams called a former neighbor, Bridget Ajufo, who had been friends with the Toures before she moved to the Woodlands, a suburb of Houston. Ajufo was stunned to hear Djena say that she would kill herself if she couldn’t find a way out. Shams, Ajufo, and Ajufo’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, Christine, came up with a plan to rescue Djena: Christine would drive up from Austin, where she lived, and take Djena to Ajufo’s house in the Woodlands, where they would figure out their next move. Djena went back to the Toures’ house and waited.
The opportunity for Djena’s escape came less than a week later, when Denise and Mohamed left town to drop Timou off at college, in Oklahoma. Even though Saran and Rema were at home, Djena was confident that she could make it out of the house with her belongings, including her passport—long expired, and hidden away in Denise’s closet—and evidence that she had lived with the Toures as a servant, which Ajufo had advised her to bring. Christine drove to Southlake, and, when she arrived, Shams messaged Djena on Facebook. “There is a grey car waiting for you right now at the end of your street,” Shams wrote. “Is it safe for you to leave?”
Djena slipped out through a side gate, carrying her backpack, her passport, and a duffelbag that Thomson had packed for her, filled with toiletries and a thousand dollars in cash.
Djena got in the car, and Christine began driving. The last message from Shams read: “So Happy for you as you Begin your New Life!”
Kate Langston, a supervisory special agent with the Diplomatic Security Service, the law-enforcement arm of the State Department, first heard about Djena in the fall of 2016, a few weeks after Djena fled the Toures’ house. A nonprofit in Houston had alerted the D.S.S. to the possibility that Djena might be a victim of human trafficking. Langston, a slim, hazel-eyed woman brimming with nervous energy, had spent much of her time at the D.S.S. investigating international trafficking cases—a specialty for her agency, because the crime often involves visa fraud.
Langston is an animated speaker, rolling her eyes and using phrases like “What the fudge?” When we met, she recalled one of her first experiences interviewing a sex-trafficking victim, shortly after she arrived at the D.S.S., in 2011. The victim described, matter-of-factly, how her trafficker had cut up jalapeños and tossed them into a toilet before banging her head against the inside of the bowl and dunking it into the water. “I’m looking at her, and I realize she has these permanent scars,” Langston told me. By the end of the interview, Langston had made it her mission to pursue traffickers: “I was, like, These are people I want to go after.”
Human trafficking is more common in the developing world, but cases have been rising steadily in the United States. According to the most recent report on the subject from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than twenty-three hundred people were referred to U.S. Attorneys for human-trafficking offenses in fiscal year 2023—a twenty-three-per-cent increase from 2013. The number of cases prosecuted rose by seventy-three per cent over the same period, from 1,030 to 1,782. Labor trafficking accounted for roughly forty-two per cent of all trafficking cases detected in 2022, although that figure doesn’t accurately represent the prevalence of the crime, because it is often harder to detect than sex trafficking.
“Forms of exploitation occur way more than Americans want to acknowledge,” Langston told me, adding that U.S. citizens often benefit from poorly compensated labor performed by men and women who have been trafficked. She gave the example of customers at a nail salon who might be paying fifty dollars for a manicure. “You walk around, and you actually start thinking, How much is all that product, how much is electricity, how much is the rent here?” Langston said. “You are not paying what you should be paying for the service that you’re getting. And these women are not making what they should be making.”
Cases of domestic servitude are even less conspicuous. Still, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has successfully prosecuted several such crimes; the perpetrators and the victims are often both immigrants. In 2022, an eighty-year-old Pakistani American woman, Zahida Aman, and two of her sons were found guilty of forcing a woman from Pakistan into domestic servitude at their home in Virginia. The victim, who came to the U.S. after marrying another one of Aman’s sons, had her immigration documents taken away and endured beatings and verbal abuse for nearly fourteen years, before finally escaping, in 2016. In 2025, Bolaji and Isiaka Bolarinwa, a Nigerian couple, were convicted by a federal court in New Jersey of coercing two women they had brought to the U.S. into performing unpaid domestic work and child care for them.
Such cases often go undetected for cultural reasons. Most families on the Toures’ street knew nothing about Guinea or Guinean culture, which made them less likely to scrutinize Djena’s situation. “I think it made the thinly veiled cover stories that Denise and Mohamed told their friends and neighbors seem plausible,” Zachary Bowen, one of Langston’s colleagues at the D.S.S., told me. The neighbors, he added, probably thought, “Yeah, maybe she doesn’t get treated that well, but she’s their niece and they rescued her and it’s still a better life than she would have back in Africa.”
When Langston and Bowen interviewed Djena for the first time, they were struck by her innocence and lack of worldliness, which they found unusual for a woman in her mid-twenties. “Talking to her was like talking to an adolescent,” Bowen told me. Djena had a plan for returning to Guinea that reflected her naïveté: she wanted to be dropped off in New Orleans because she’d heard that people there spoke French, as they did in Guinea, which had given her the notion that, once there, she would be able to find a “motor park”—a transport hub that is common in urban centers across Africa, where travellers can board long-distance buses. From there, she thought she could get a ride back to her village.
Still, Langston and Bowen were initially circumspect. They knew from experience that most labor-trafficking claims do not stand up to inquiry. Many turn out to be disputes over wages. In some instances, the allegations proved to be a ploy to obtain a special visa that the U.S. government grants to trafficking victims. But midway through their first interview with Djena the agents’ skepticism began to wane. “She makes this comment that she never celebrated her birthday,” Langston recounted. “That was the moment for both of us where we were, like, We actually have something here.”
They still needed evidence, however, that Djena had indeed been trafficked for forced labor. Aside from the tourist visa she had entered with, there were no records attached to her name, nothing that could speak to the sixteen years she had spent at the Toure residence—a whole life hidden inside a house. “How do you prove a case of a ghost?” Langston remembered thinking.
The investigators began by interviewing the neighbors. Several remembered Djena working in the Toures’ yard or walking home with groceries. One neighbor said she’d been shocked when her children casually referred to Djena as a “slave,” a term that some of the neighborhood kids apparently used for her. Another neighbor told Langston and Bowen that she and her daughter were watching a television show about trafficking one day when it occurred to them that Djena might be a trafficking victim. And then, the neighbor said, they’d talked themselves out of it. Their reasoning was that such a thing couldn’t happen in that neighborhood.
“We were, like, Oh, my God, they freaking knew, and they never said anything,” Langston told me. The agents were astonished by how obvious Djena’s enslavement seemed to have been, and by the number of people who had failed to act. The one exception was a neighbor who had called the F.B.I. to report the possibility that Djena was an indentured servant. The tip was referred to Child Protective Services, but nothing came of it.
Given that the Toures had presented Djena to their neighbors and friends as a family member, the investigators began looking for evidence that Djena was treated profoundly differently from the other Toure children. Her lack of schooling was the most obvious place to start. The investigators learned that Ajufo had made an effort, around 2004, to enroll Djena in school, telling Denise that it was illegal not to educate a child. Denise had explained that Djena didn’t have the necessary paperwork to enroll. Ajufo then found a school that would accept Djena without documentation. But Denise was still unwilling; she told Ajufo that she was focussed on other issues. One of her sons, Marcel, was failing in math, and had been dropped from his school’s hockey team as a result. Ajufo and Denise struck a deal: Ajufo’s eldest son would tutor Marcel in math for the next three months, and, if Marcel passed, Denise would send Djena to school. “Marcel passed the exam, got promoted to the next class, got back on the hockey team,” Ajufo told me. “And I thought everything was a go.” She even offered to drive Djena to school to make it easier for Denise. Then, the Friday before Djena was supposed to begin classes, Denise told Ajufo that she had changed her mind.
In the sixteen years that Djena lived in Southlake, Denise and Mohamed never took her to a doctor. Their own children got the usual medical care: vaccines, braces, glasses. Early in her time at the house, Djena fell in the kitchen and cracked a front tooth. She pulled the tooth out herself. Djena recalled seeing a dentist just once, when Mohamed took her to a dental school to deal with an abscessed tooth.
The agents set out to find a record of this visit. Djena didn’t remember the school’s name, but had a vague recollection of what it looked like, and so Langston and Bowen drove to dental colleges around Dallas until they found one that resembled her description: Texas A&M’s College of Dentistry. When the administrative staff searched for Djena’s name in their database, nothing came up. But they did find a patient visit from July, 2014, associated with Mohamed’s cellphone number. Djena’s name was misspelled, and the birth date didn’t match the one on her passport. Mohamed had paid for the appointment in cash.
The dental record was the investigators’ first positive proof that Djena was treated differently, which distinguished it from all the other evidence they had gathered at that point—evidence that indicated an absence of something the Toure kids had. It also demonstrated an attempt by the Toures to conceal Djena’s existence. “They drove her all the way across the Metroplex to a university clinic, misspelled her name, paid in cash,” Bowen told me. “That’s not an accident. That’s them taking steps to hide what they were doing.”
Early on, the investigators had asked the Southlake Police whether there were any records related to Djena but found nothing. Then, almost two years into the investigation, Langston stopped by the police station and was chatting with a different administrator, who asked Langston whether the initial search had also been conducted in an older database that not everybody on staff knew about. “I was, like, ‘What?’ ” Langston recalled.
In the old system, the administrator found an incident report from April 30, 2002, filed by an officer named Darrell Mayhew, who had found Djena by herself in the park near the Toures’ residence. This was one of the early instances in which Djena was kicked out of the house. She was around twelve years old at the time.
Mayhew, who now works as a police officer at a public school, told me that he had encountered a young girl whose hair was matted and whose clothes were dishevelled. She was visibly nervous. When he took her back to her house, the Toures seemed apprehensive rather than relieved, which Mayhew found odd. They said that they had legally adopted Djena from Guinea to save her from war and poverty. When Mayhew asked how long Djena had been missing, Mohamed appeared to be “evading the question,” Mayhew wrote in his report. “The whole thing—from her demeanor and her reaction to me, to their response to my questions—everything was just off,” Mayhew told me.
For Langston, this was irrefutable evidence that Denise and Mohamed had sought to hide Djena’s status by falsely claiming that she was adopted. Langston arranged a meeting with Mayhew at a Chili’s to discuss the report. “He actually got teary-eyed,” Langston told me. “And he was, like, I knew something was wrong. I should have done something. I should have done more.” Mayhew told me that he was still haunted by guilt. “You have to understand where law enforcement was at the time,” he said. “As far as trafficking, nobody knew anything about it.”
On the morning of April 25, 2018, D.S.S. agents and local police arrested Mohamed and Denise at their home in Southlake. While searching the property, Langston saw hundreds of photographs of the Toures and their extended family on display throughout the rooms. Djena wasn’t in a single one. “She never made a frame, never made the refrigerator, never made the wall,” Langston told me. Among the few thousand photographs stored in the house, Djena appeared in fewer than forty. In one image from the early years, Denise and Mohamed are posing in the garden with their kids, while Djena is off to the side, smiling at the camera, in the middle of doing what looks like yard work.
Denise and Mohamed were charged with forced labor, harboring an alien for financial gain, and conspiracies to commit forced labor and to harbor an alien. Mohamed, who allegedly claimed, while being interviewed by investigators, that he had tried to adopt Djena, was also charged with making false statements to federal agents. They pleaded not guilty. That July, Langston travelled to Conakry and interviewed Djena’s family to help build the case. In the fall, while the prosecution and the defense prepared for trial, the Guinean government wrote to Jeff Sessions, the recently resigned Attorney General, alleging that D.S.S. agents had violated Guinean laws by conducting investigations in Conakry without authorization. One of Langston’s colleagues in D.C., John Freeman, went with his boss to meet the Guinean Ambassador, who brought up the Toures’ case. “Is there something that could be done?” the Ambassador asked. When Freeman’s boss said no, another Guinean official in the room pressed harder. “He’s, like, ‘You can’t make a call to the judge or the prosecutor?’ ” Freeman recalled. Freeman told them that the opportunity to make a plea deal had passed.
The Toures’ indictment made headlines in the Guinean press, and, on the first day of the trial, supporters of the family protested in Conakry, dressed in T-shirts featuring an image of Mohamed and Denise, with the slogan “Liberez le Couple Toure” written underneath. In Fort Worth, Djena took the stand, facing her abusers for the first time in years. Gone was the meek servant child, replaced by a confident woman who remained composed during aggressive cross-examination.
One of the government’s witnesses was Djena’s mother, Maladho, whom the prosecution had flown in from Guinea. In the two decades since Djena had left home, they had spoken only once by phone. Djena had always assumed that her mother had sent her away willingly, but, on the second day of the trial, Maladho told the court how she had hidden her daughter for days before Djena’s father took her to the Croses’ residence in Conakry.
“Why did you hide her?” one of the prosecutors asked.
“Because I didn’t want her to become somebody’s slave,” Maladho replied, speaking through a Malinke interpreter. “I didn’t want her to go.”
The defense argued that the government’s case was founded on ignorance of Guinean culture: that Djena had been willingly entrusted to the Toures, in keeping with Guinean custom, so that she could have a better life. Scott Palmer, one of the attorneys representing Denise, underscored the fact that Djena wasn’t kept in the house against her will, or prevented from using the internet. How could someone who was able to post on Instagram and go jogging in the neighborhood claim to have been a victim of forced labor? Palmer argued that Djena had fabricated the trafficking narrative to secure legal status in the U.S.
The jury disagreed. On January 10, 2019, Denise and Mohamed were found guilty of nearly all charges; later that year, they were sentenced to seven years in prison. The court also ordered them to pay Djena nearly three hundred thousand dollars in restitution. As of July, 2025, according to court documents, the Toures had paid her less than four thousand dollars.
I spoke with Djena for the first time in 2024, years after the trial. She had legally changed her name and was reluctant to revisit the trauma of her time with the Toures and the sixteen years she’d lost. After leaving Southlake, she lived for a few months at Ajufo’s house, where she celebrated her birthday for the first time, and continued learning to read and write English, with Ajufo’s help. Later, she got a job in retail, began learning to drive, and moved into an apartment. “I want to do my G.E.D.,” she told me, “so I have something to show for everything that I went through.”
She had no relationship with her family in Guinea. It had been a comfort to learn that her mother had tried to keep her from being taken—that the separation had not been chosen. After Maladho’s day in court, a D.S.S. analyst had brought Djena to the hotel where her mother was staying, and they hugged—mother and daughter made strangers by circumstance and the passage of time. The analyst stepped out to give them privacy, and they sat together on the hotel bed and talked. Maladho had brought gifts from home and showed Djena pictures of her siblings.
But her subsequent conversations with her mother “didn’t go so well,” Djena told me. “We don’t really know each other.” She didn’t think they would ever have a strong connection. “She has this idea of me, but I’m not that person.”
It was clear that the practical challenges of building a life from scratch in her late twenties—getting an education, holding a job—were perhaps not the hardest part of this new chapter. Embracing adulthood after having her childhood and adolescence stolen likely demanded even more courage and resilience. Djena had made a few friends, she told me, but they didn’t know what she had been through. “I am very hesitant to tell someone,” she said. “Because I don’t want them to think I’m weak or even try to use it against me.”
Her caution might also have stemmed from the knowledge that Denise and Mohamed were nearing the end of their sentences. Both are now out of prison. Denise left the U.S. for Belgium, an act that violated the conditions of her supervised release. In February of 2025, Mohamed returned to Guinea. Upon landing at the international airport in Conakry, which is named after his father, he was greeted by Guinea’s foreign minister. The Guinean government issued a press release stating that “after several years of legal troubles and detention in the United States,” Mohamed and Denise had regained their freedom, owing to the “personal involvement” of the current President of Guinea, General Mamady Doumbouya. Subsequent news stories published in the Guinean press similarly framed Mohamed’s return as a triumph of justice.
One person with whom Djena can speak freely is Langston; the two have kept in touch. In December, I learned from Langston that Djena was doing well. She had changed jobs, and she had a boyfriend. If things continued to go well, it seemed, she might be able to put down roots—and, one day, start a family of her own. ♦