One girl's ordeal of terror

She was just 12 years old that summer, a 96-pound sixth-grader at a St. Paul magnet school. Her Frogtown apartment sweltered in the rising heat, so she and two friends walked to a corner store for ice cream.

They didn't have far to go -- maybe four blocks. As the girls started home, three guys pulled up in a tan Toyota Corolla and began flirting with them. The driver offered them a ride.

The 12-year-old said no. But the boys persisted. "They started hollering at us, 'Oh, c'mon, girls, let's go play!' " she recalled.

The girl said she reluctantly got into the car at the urging of one of her friends. That simple act -- accepting a ride from strangers -- set into motion a chain of events that led to the unthinkable: forced prostitution by gang members and a seemingly unending series of rapes by a number of Hmong men.

Her ordeal illustrates how Hmong men and boys have raped Hmong girls -- some as young as 10. It is a problem that emerged in the late 1990s and continues today.

This girl told her story so the Hmong community might come to understand how such things happen, and as a cautionary tale to parents and other girls.

It's a story she has told over and over, to police, medical personnel, counselors, lawyers, jurors and reporters. Her accounts are remarkably consistent. Because she is a rape victim and a juvenile, the Star Tribune is using a pseudonym -- Ka -- to protect her privacy.

A troubled home

Ka and her friends accepted a ride on that hot summer day because one of the girls wanted to talk with a boy in the car. "She's like, 'If you guys are my true friends, you've gotta go with me,' " Ka said.

The girls said they had to be home by 9 p.m., and the driver, a 20-year-old gang member from Detroit who called himself JB, agreed.

"But that night, they never sent us home," she said. "We was on drugs."

This was not Ka's first experience with drugs. She had begun experimenting several months earlier, when she met two guys on the stoop of her apartment building who were smoking methamphetamine. Before long, Ka started skipping school. She cut class so often that spring that she flunked sixth grade.

Ka said her parents' divorce had been troubling her. Her dad was living in Minneapolis with her brother. Her older sister rotated between stints in a hospital, living with her mother, and living with a foster family, she said. Ka, her mother and five younger siblings struggled to get by, often going hungry. They moved from one run-down St. Paul apartment to another.

The summer she met JB they were living in a 110-year-old duplex about a mile east of the state Capitol. Ka said she turned to drugs to escape her anger.

No free ride

After the ice cream outing, Ka didn't see JB for a while. Then one day near the end of summer vacation, she ran into him again at a laundry. He was with a friend, a 20-year-old man called Taz who had moved to the Twin Cities from California.

For the next couple of weeks, Taz -- whose real name was Toua Hong Chang -- entertained Ka and her friends, giving them rides in his sporty red Nissan 240 SX. The girls said he kept crystal meth in an M&M candy tube and offered them all they wanted.

The girls thought he was giving them meth for free, but about the time school was starting, he said it was time to pay up. Ka said she offered to scrape up some money at home, but Taz refused to let her go. Instead, she says, he ordered her to work as a prostitute for him, beginning immediately.

He had taken Ka and two of her friends to a Minneapolis duplex surrounded by a tall chain-link fence. Taz placed a call and three Asian men soon arrived in a shiny black Mercedes SUV.

"When the guys came, all of a sudden he's just pointed a gun at us," Ka later told authorities in a tape-recorded interview. She said he swore at her, demanding that she have sex with the men: "If [you] don't, I'm going to kill you right now!"

'I'm just a little girl'

Ka says Taz tricked her into going into the basement, then ordered her to wait there. Terror gripped her as she listened to the muffled voices upstairs. It was early afternoon, and dim light seeped in through the narrow windows. She could see a stranger's dark trousers and shiny leather shoes at the top of the stairs. As they started down toward her, she looked in vain for a way out.

The shoes belonged to the driver of the black Mercedes, a medium-built Hmong man with graying hair and yellow teeth, Ka said. She didn't know him, but he was Taz's uncle, Pao Xiong, now 35, of St. Paul. Authorities say he worked for some chiropractors and lawyers as an interpreter.

He took off his suit coat, then his white dress shirt.

OK, take your clothes off, she remembers him telling her.

When she hesitated, she said, he grabbed the hem of her blouse and ripped it as he pulled it over her head, then pushed her onto her back.

Ka said she tried to kick him. She tried to grab her ankles to keep him from yanking down her jeans. But the skinny sixth-grader was no match for him.

Upstairs, someone turned up the music. She pleaded with Xiong to stop: You know, you're old. ... Why you gotta do this?

Well, I paid already, she recalled him saying.

Afterward, Taz came downstairs and told her she had more work to do. She didn't cry out, she said, because Taz had already warned her: Don't even try to scream.

Taz returned with a tall, skinny Asian man in his 20s, Ka said. She never learned his name, but she remembers his bright yellow T-shirt and black shoes.

"And [Taz] just looked at me like, with this evil in his eye, and I got so scared," she recalled.

She told the skinny man that Xiong had hurt her. She asked him to get his money back and let her go. She said he responded, If I do that, Taz is going to kill you.

Ka said he then forced her onto the bed.

You know, I'm just a little girl. I'm only 12 years old, she told him.

But the man pinned her arms and legs and raped her, she said.

Before the third man could take his turn, Taz burst into the room and told her to get dressed -- everyone had to leave immediately. One of the residents of the duplex wanted everyone out because his brother had returned from work.

The girl said Taz gave her $20 and warned her that if she told anyone what had happened, she or her family would be killed. He told her and her friends to get in the Mercedes. The men who had raped her would drive them home.

The girls didn't want the men to know where they lived, so they told the driver to drop them off at a Burger King on University Avenue. They cried as they walked Ka home. Her older sister later overheard the girls talking and asked what was wrong. Ka turned her away.

She worried that her family might demand that she marry one of her attackers, a traditional Hmong resolution. She had other worries, too.

Her friends reminded her: If we tell, Taz will come after us and kill us.

Afraid to run

Sometime later, as Ka walked to McDonald's with a friend, Taz and a friend pulled up in a blue car. He ordered her and her 13-year-old companion to get in, Ka said. She refused at first but got scared when Taz yelled at her. "He looked evil," she remembered.

Taz drove them to a house on Richmond Street in St. Paul, where he lived with his wife, baby and the man in the car.

Taz and his friend led the two girls to a garage behind the house and gave them meth, she said. He left for an errand, and when he returned, Ka said, he accused her and the others of stealing his drugs. He produced a long black gun with a folding stock. As he loaded red shells into the gun, Ka said, he boasted about how fast he could shoot. "He told us to go stand in a line so he could kill us," she said.

After a heated argument, Taz sent his friend and Ka outside, leaving him alone with the 13-year-old. His buddy slipped a padlock on the latch, trapping the girl inside.

Ka waited outside, afraid that she knew what was happening in the garage.

Her friend later testified that Taz threw a mattress on the floor, tied her hands behind her back with a jump rope and raped her. She didn't dare fight, she said. The shotgun was leaning against the door.

After the rape of her friend, Ka ran away and stayed with friends in Minneapolis for about two weeks. When she resurfaced, Taz found her and the rapes began again. During the next several weeks, she was raped by at least four of Taz's friends. Ka said in an interview and told authorities that Taz raped her, too, but in court testimony, she said she couldn't recall. Taz was not charged with raping her.

Birthday horror

The last time Ka was raped was her last day as a 12-year-old. She was walking across the street to invite a friend to her 13th birthday party, she said, when Taz and his friends drove up. It was October 2002. Taz demanded that she help him look for another girl, she said. She balked, and one of Ka's younger brothers demanded that Taz leave her alone. The boy ran for help, but Taz pulled her into the car and drove off.

When they arrived at the south Minneapolis home of a man nicknamed "Ocean," five or six men were already there, including JB, Ka said. She saw a girl on the floor with her shirt ripped open.

"She was just looking at me and said, 'Take me home, OK?' " Ka recalled.

Before Ka could answer the girl, Taz pulled her into a bedroom, ordered her to strip and threw a handful of condoms on the bed.

"I was thinking, ... 'Oh my God, I don't want to do this,'" she said.

Five men took turns with her that night, she said. She thought one was a distant relative. When Ka threatened to tell her mother on him, she said he told her, Go ahead. Tell and see what happens.

The man was rough, she said; he raped and sodomized her.

When the men were finished, Ka said she demanded that Taz take her home.

"Somehow, they know that it was my birthday that day," Ka said. "And they was like, 'Stay with us, we will throw a big party for you!' "

After one of the men took her home, she said: "That was the time that I decided to run. I just don't want that to happen to me again."

After her birthday, Ka told her older sister what had happened. Then she ran away to a cousin's house two blocks away, hoping Taz wouldn't find her.

She heard that he and his friends drove past her house several times.

"I was thinking to myself that I should run out of state or something so that they can't find me, but I don't want to do that because I don't want to leave my family," Ka said.

She stopped going to school while she hid. That's what finally brought her to the attention of authorities.

Ramsey County has an aggressive truancy intervention program. Deputy William Harvel talked to Ka's sister, who told him Ka's story. When Harvel found her, Ka was too afraid to talk.

"The first time, I was just, like, stuttering," she said.

Epilogue

Ka looked around the alley behind her apartment building as she retold her story last year. Taz and JB were locked up at the time; so was Taz's uncle, the first man to rape her. But others were still at large, and she feared they might be looking for her.

Ka had testified against Taz, recounting the horrors he put her through. On her first day of testimony, she suffered a panic attack and paramedics were rushed to the courtroom. She persevered, though, returning the next day to resume testifying.

Taz was eventually found guilty of prostituting Ka and sexually assaulting her friend, along with a related gang charge. He was sentenced in August 2003 to more than 20 years in prison.

Ka said that as Taz lined up sex clients, she recalled thinking that her family loved her and that they had urged her to be good. "But I didn't listen to them," she said. "I was like, I'm gonna go kill myself after this."

Ka has since had a lot of counseling. For the most part, she has managed to bury the past. But a patchwork of scars on her forearms betrays her suffering. Medical workers who treat rape victims say they often cut themselves as Ka has done.

At first, she said, she blamed herself because she had gone with Taz and used drugs. "I don't think that no more," she said.

"I'm going to school,I'm doing OK. I like math," she said last year. "I want me to go to school and college and just have a nice life."

Since then, Ka, now almost 16, has dropped out of school and run away again.