If you’re a fan of action movies, have I got a show for you. No, it’s not about how they make action movies, it’s about how real-life people who have been kidnapped for ransom and children who have been sold into the sex trade are rescued.
While you might expect this to involve the FBI, the cops or any kind of law enforcement, in real life, there are companies who specialize in finding abductees when cases have gone cold or by tracking them using resources beyond the budgets of state and local officials.
While each week a different firm is featured on Discovery Channel’s new series “Kidnap & Rescue,” tonight the reenactments are of operations carried out by the HALO Corporation, a private San Diego security firm. HALO was founded by a former US Special Ops leader who works with former Special Ops and intelligence personnel to track, hunt and rescue those who have been taken and are being held against their will.
The first part of the hour-long premiere is called “Farmhouse” and it deals with the 2005 kidnapping of a dual US/Mexican citizen who was snatched at gunpoint from his home. While his wife screamed in terror, the kidnappers beat the man, cut his finger off, abducted him and held him for ransom.
With reenactments (thank God, they use real actors — not two-dollar extras!), the series recreates exactly what happened in this situation, from the abduction to the rescue. And, yes, your heart will be in your throat every step of the way, in ways you just won’t get from a fictional action/adventure movie.
But it’s the next part of the show, “Goldilocks,” that will pierce your heart. The rescue operation involved finding a teenage girl who was lured away from a party by a few males who were there and said they were off to another party. By the time she staggered drunk to their car, it was all over.
She was bound, gagged and taken to Mexico to become a sex-slave worker. The case went cold for three years until her family brought in HALO, who tracked her to a filthy brothel in Mexico where she’d been turned into a heroin and meth addict.
You will watch how they rescued her — she was bound hand-and-foot with chains to a bed when she wasn’t “working,” as were many other women — and took her out screaming and terrified.
The worst part, however, comes three weeks after she’s returned to her family in the US. Not every rescue has a happy ending.
Next week, they feature a group that rescues children who are snatched and sold into slavery.
You won’t believe what victims endure or the bravery of the rescuers who do in real-life what Tom Cruise pretends to do in the movies.
Don’t miss it.