A teen who was forced by her captor to have sex with multiple men while being tied up in a basement escaped when her captor left the house to attend a court appearance, police said.
Benjamin Franklin Hooks, 24, allegedly locked the 19-year-old in a basement, sometimes in a cage, where he made her wear a dog collar, the New York Post reported.
Police said Hooks allegedly forced the victim to have sex with several men while she was tied up and blindfolded.
Investigators said the teen “would usually get one to two meals each day” and would share food with a pit bull with which she was locked up, WITI reports.
The victim originally went to live at the three-family home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to work as a caregiver for the home’s 69-year-old owner, according to a criminal complaint.
However, she told police that “people started showing up and taking over the house.”
“Some guys come in — they push right in and they start going around,” the homeowner recalled. “There are just groups of guys — people who are around the neighborhood. … He came in, snuck in after someone moved out.”
The victim said she escaped when Hooks left the house for a court appearance stemming from human trafficking charges in an unrelated case involving a 15-year-old girl and a 20-year-old woman, court records show.
Hooks is being held at the Milwaukee County Jail on $150,000 bond. He has three cases against him — one going as far back as January and one as recent as late May.
Some of the charges he faces in those cases include battery, first-degree sexual assault, human trafficking, child abuse, second-degree sexual assault of a child, and use of a dangerous weapon.
Several other women held as sex slaves were also able to escape from their captors.
In 2012, a St. Louis woman escaped from her captor in Illinois after three years.
In May, a 17-year-old girl from West Africa was also able to escape from her captor in Sydney, Australia.