Caseworkers fail to see alleged victims at home visits in Ashland trafficking case

By CHRIS COTELESSE

TheNewsOutlet.org

YOUNGSTOWN

Social services workers made several visits to an Ashland home during the time federal prosecutors allege the tenants were imprisoning and abusing a cognitively impaired woman and her 5 year-old daughter.

Between August 2010 and June 2011, Dawn Trackler, a former caseworker with Ashland County Jobs and Family Services, said she made “at least 10” visits to the address but saw S.E. only once.

Trackler testified Thursday as a witness for prosecutors in the case against Jessica L. Hunt, 31, and Jordie L. Callahan, 26, both of Ashland, who both face federal charges of labor-trafficking conspiracy and abuse of the 30-year-old woman known in court papers only as “S.E.”

They also are charged with stealing her government-assistance checks. If convicted of those charges, they could face 39 years in prison.

If the jury considers the sentencing enhancement for kidnapping, they could receive life in prison.

The trial continues today before U.S. District Judge Benita Pearson in the Thomas D. Lambros U.S. Federal Building and Courthouse. The proceedings are expected to continue through next week.

Trackler said Thursday under direct examination from U.S. attorneys that her visits were part of a plan to re-unify Hunt with her four sons, who had been taken away from her by JFS.

During the first visit, Trackler saw S.E., a woman who suffered brain injuries after an automobile accident when she was 16.

Trackler told Hunt that S.E. could not stay at the residence.

Trackler said she did not see S.E. during the following 10 months and did not know that S.E. was living in the basement.

S.E. testified earlier this week that after Trackler’s first visit, Hunt and Callahan moved her and her daughter into the basement, where they were locked in each night and forced to use the floor as a bathroom.

S.E. also testified the couple had beaten, caged and raped her.

Mindy Trevino, a case worker with Appleseed Community Mental Health Center of Ashland, also visited the residence regularly, but she testified she only walked inside twice.

Case workers also had another opportunity to view S.E.’s purported squalid living conditions when upstairs neighbor Derek Lawrence called the Ashland County Health Department on March 14, 2012.

Lawrence told Shirley Bixby, the department’s director of nursing and communicable disease, that Hunt and Callahan were imprisoning S.E. and her daughter.

“He said that there was a mentally challenged woman and her daughter that were being held at [Hunt’s and Callahan’s] home in a locked room, and when they do let them out, they were being abused,” Bixby said.

Lawrence moved into an upstairs apartment in the same triplex where Callahan and Hunt lived on West Main Street on Feb. 25, 2012.

Under cross-examination, Ed Bryan, a defense attorney for Hunt, challenged Lawrence about whether he had lived in the complex long enough to know what was happening.

Lawrence said he also had “hung out” there with Hunt and Callahan a few times but only saw S.E.’s daughter leave her room “two or three times,” Lawrence testified.

But Callahan and Lawrence later had a falling out, Bryan said.

The feud started after a tattoo Callahan had given to Lawrence’s cousin became infected. Bryan said, Lawrence “was angry with [Callahan] and wanted to get him in trouble.”

Lawrence admitted that anger motivated his call to the health department, but he said he didn’t lie.

“It was something that was on my mind,” he said. “It seemed like [S.E.] wasn’t being taken care of. … I just thought that wasn’t right.”

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