VICTIM
STORIES

Jayden was a sweet and happy kid. He ran away from home to be with his girlfriend who got him to try drugs and he became hooked. They became homeless together.

 

This story is in Jayden’s own words: I remember exactly where I was when I gave up my self worth. I cared so much more about what I wanted to feel, and what I was running from, than the parts of my soul and body I gave up.

 

I’m gender-fluid, meaning the way I identify is flexible. I present as a male body, who wears crop tops, and likes to paint their nails, while also looking spiffy. This usually translates to queer, or gay in the trap house (where drugs are sold).

 

I had moved into the most notorious house in Palm Beach County. Like the kind that won’t call anyone if you die there, where there wasn’t running water. It’s known as Clubhouse by everyone and has been there for 50+ years. If the cops came, you were lucky.

​

I was renting the back room there with my girlfriend at the time. We would make lots of money, so people would often rely on us to bring it in.

 

In that house it was mainly old heads, people everyone either already knew or sold to, and we had two other prostitutes that lives there. There would be visits from certain dealers in chain gang (which I often felt much safer around), but after 5 months of living there, and after a recent break in (some people with knives that kicked in every door in the house), three men moved in that were part of the bloods.

 

They seemed to get along with the normal crew there at first, but one day the biggest guy in the group asked to borrow my phone and went outside. He came back hours later and gave me this story that someone at the store he went to said I owed them money, and that he had to pay it for me, and that if I didn’t pay it he was going to hurt my girlfriend and me.

 

He kept my phone and said I had till 8pm to make the money. They locked us in there until we were able to come up with something. We literally had to use the restroom in that room in bottles, and lived like animals because we couldn’t leave. I was not only a slave to them, but even more so to the drugs.

​

I had to beg to get my phone back so I could try to make money somehow. One of the other guys from the bloods let us borrow their phone and fed us more drugs.

 

Then we had customers come there. Luckily for my girlfriend she had a sugar daddy coming to pick her up, for more than a day.

 

I remember waking up sick locked in there with no phone and rummaging around looking for whatever I could find to feel better in that room. I wasn’t able to get away from that place and ended up doing whatever I could to survive.

 

They had a man come who kept me with him for over an hour and kept begging me go to his hotel with him. I knew he would kill me or keep me there locked up if I left with him. It was such an evil heavy feeling in that house. So dark and covered in dirt. He wanted to see my girlfriend, but got me instead just because he noticed my nails painted and I needed the money.

​

I kept my mind on everything else, but what I was being put through. Like how they told me that if someone died we never called 911. We put them in the yard or saved them. It was so heavy with death and sorrow.

 

After he was done with me he ran out without paying anything. They all laughed and wouldn’t let me use the phone or anything. One person spoke up for me saying if they saw him again they would make him pay.

 

After that, the bloods ended up going to a hotel which meant I had to come along because I owed money and was essentially property. My two friends (one was my close friend Brittany, and one my friend that also sold drugs to me sometimes) were already there.

 

When I got there I said something about my family coming for me. That’s when one man locked the door looked out the peep hole and said, “I just got out of jail, I don’t care if I go back over this” and beat me until my dealer friend ran in front of him to stop him. I was staring him down like a crazy person.

 

I was able to call my dad off one of their phones and begged him to come pay my debt.

​

he girl who ran between myself and the person beating me I’ll never forget. She had been shot in face, but had survived and had facial reconstruction, she was really beautiful, and didn’t want me to suffer more.

 

When my dad finally pulled up, the girl and Brittany came downstairs with me to make sure they got the money. Brittany said to me “go get clean, and get away from this life, you don’t have to live like this” and I’ll never forget it. She died of overdose a few weeks later.

 

I didn’t get it right that first time I went to treatment. But after I was saved I survived till I could be clean today.

 

Someday I will be thriving more than ever.

 

Today he is sober but still learning to take what happened and use it to become the healer he always wanted to be.

 

Jayden is a THRIVER.