WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — While thousands are in Las Vegas ready to watch the Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, a Wichita-area man is there on a different mission.
Dayton Poe is working with the Nevada Highway Patrol as well as Free International, a nonprofit that helps victims of human trafficking.
Volunteers take posters of missing children and reach out to family, friends, and last contacts in the hope of finding survivors and helping them start a new life. Poe said they’ve found 10 missing children since arriving in Las Vegas last weekend.
“It’s exciting to find a missing child, and then you hear their backstory,” Poe said. “And you hear the trauma that they’ve been through. So you go from a ‘yes, we located,’ to ‘man, I hate the life that they’re living,’ and so, that drives us … we want to give a life, give them a normal life, and they haven’t experienced that many times.”
Poe said it’s an ongoing problem, though, and just because someone is rescued once doesn’t mean they won’t go back to the same lifestyle.