Long Island leaders want inquiry into whether agencies failed missing girl who was allegedly sex trafficked

Elected leaders on Long Island are asking for an inquiry into how a 14-year-old East Patchogue girl was allegedly sex trafficked while missing for 25 days on the Island last year after her family pleaded with county officials for help.

"It's our responsibility as legislators to find out what's going on, and I don't want to be accusatory but I think the No. 1 thing is, what was reported and when was it reported and who found out?" Suffolk Legis. Jason Richberg said.

Looming large over this girl’s case is whether new county safeguards failed after the 2020 killing of 8-year-old Thomas Valva, who was forced to sleep in a freezing garage by his NYPD officer father and his fiancee. "After things that have happened in the past, I think it's important that we ensure that we're doing our due diligence to get those answers," Richberg said.

The Suffolk Legislature's Democratic minority leader said his staff has asked for a briefing on the county's involvement in the girl's case, but has yet to get one. Even before the formal meeting, some new ideas for changes were beginning to emerge, including more education on the issue of sex trafficking for parents and children, and better screening for at-risk youth.

Elected leaders who spoke to Newsday said it was too soon to cast blame on Suffolk County Child Protective Services, one of the agencies that had been involved in the girl’s case before her disappearance.

Michelle DiDio, the girl's stepgrandmother, said Child Protective Services was involved in the case in a letter written to County Executive Edward P. Romaine pleading for help from county officials in the months before the teen's disappearance.

After-action report sought

Members of the Suffolk County Legislature, which has oversight of county agencies such as Child Protective Services — which investigates allegations of child abuse — said they are still in the fact-finding stage and have not been briefed on the particulars of the girl's case.

Richberg, who co-chaired a legislative committee that suggested reforms to Child Protective Services following the Valva case, said an after-action report should be compiled for legislative review. He told Newsday last week that his chief of staff requested a meeting with the Department of Social Services, which oversees Child Protective Services, but has not received a response.

"I wish I had an inkling as to why they didn’t respond," Richberg said last week. "I’m assuming, and I don’t want to make too many assumptions, I’m assuming they’re putting together a full presentation. But I haven’t heard anything so I don’t want to jump to any conclusions as of yet."

Watch what Suffolk Legis. Richberg said

Newsday is not naming the girl, now 15, because she is a minor and the victim of alleged and adjudicated sex crimes. Child Protective Services' records are confidential and exempt from the state's public records law. But Newsday, in an investigation that involved the review of thousands of pages of court documents, has been able to detail some of what happened.

The girl's father reported her missing from her East Patchogue home on Dec. 9 and launched a social media campaign in an effort to find her. During the time she was gone, prosecutors said she was given illegal drugs and repeatedly raped by adult men. She was found on a dilapidated yacht docked at the marina near White Cap Fish Market in Islip on Jan. 3.

Twenty-three defendants have been charged in New York and Minnesota with crimes allegedly committed against the girl, including rape, kidnapping and drugs. Six defendants have pleaded guilty; the others have maintained their innocence.

Newsday detailed the girl's story in "Unprotected," an investigation into sex trafficking on Long Island. The story examined the girl's abuse and the systems designed to protect the vulnerable that failed her.

Several months before the girl's 25-day disappearance, her stepgrandmother emailed Romaine and other county officials, pleading for help for the girl, Newsday has reported.

"Our system is broken, there is no mental health help period, no one wants to go out of their box to even attempt to help," DiDio wrote in February 2024.

Romaine didn’t respond to the letter. 

The girl’s father filed a notice of claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, against the county in March, arguing his daughter’s constitutional rights were violated when she was allegedly sexually abused after being found on the yacht and then placed at Sagamore Children’s Psychiatric Center, a state mental health treatment facility. According to the notice of claim, the girl was in Sagamore on or about Jan. 5 and was assaulted there on or about Feb. 1. A lawsuit has not yet been filed. 

Can we do better?

Suffolk County spokesman Michael Martino said neither Romaine nor the DSS commissioner — who oversees CPS — could respond "due to pending litigation." Romaine appointed the county's commissioner of social services, John E. Imhof, whose agency supervises CPS.

Staff for Gov. Kathy Hochul did not make someone available for comment. Romaine and Suffolk Police Commissioner Kevin Catalina declined repeated interview requests as Newsday continued to report on the broader issue of sex trafficking of young people and what can be done to combat it.

"We are planning to meet with the commissioner [of the Department of Social Services] and speak to him outside the public arena," said Legis. Kevin J. McCaffrey, the presiding officer of the Suffolk County Legislature. "We need to have a heart to heart, along with the administration, and say, 'Hey, what can we do better here?'"

McCaffrey said last week he has not yet met with anyone from the Department of Social Services about the case.

Watch what Suffolk Legis. McCaffrey said

"I think in this situation, it was a very difficult situation," said McCaffrey, a Republican from Lindenhurst. "We did a lot of things in this county. We sent her for treatment. We monitored her. We had a GPS bracelet that she cut off. We sent her into drug rehab twice. A lot of people say, what else could we have done other than what is being done now where she's being incarcerated?"

The girl’s father, Frank Gervasi, did not respond to a call or text for comment. The girl’s mother, Melissa Dervay, declined to comment.

Court records reviewed by Newsday shed light on details of the girl’s life. The girl's parents divorced when she was 4, and she bounced between their homes. While living with her father, who aspired to become a member of the biker club Hells Angels, the girl was apparently exposed to his sex life, which he shared on social media.

Her father and stepmother, Alyson Gervasi, made amateur pornography together that they posted to Pornhub, an adult website. Newsday has reported the girl showed former seventh grade classmates at her Patchogue middle school videos of her father and stepmother having sex.

 Legis. Trish Bergin, who chairs the legislature's Seniors and Human Services Committee, said the girl's case appears more emblematic of soft parenting than any governmental failures.

 "I think her parents probably should have done a better job in keeping their child safe and then when she fell into the catch net of the system of DSS, while we gave her resources and put her in specific places for safety and treatment, she broke out, left, cut off the ankle bracelet," Bergin said, adding she has spoken to Imhof, as well as DSS’ chief counsel, Anne E. Oh, and the deputy county executive who oversees DSS, Sylvia Diaz, about the girl’s case.

Watch what Suffolk Legis. Bergin said

Newsday reported the girl started smoking crack cocaine at 13 years old, after being introduced to the drug by a much older man. She was assigned to home schooling because she became disruptive at school.

Her father tried to get her help, taking advantage of county services provided to child sex trafficking victims. She was fitted with a GPS monitoring bracelet from the Suffolk County Department of Probation and her father was advised to monitor her phone and add restrictions to prevent her from accessing social media.

The girl was frustrated by the restrictions, and her father loosened some of the new boundaries by letting her be late or miss homeschooling lessons, Newsday has reported.

On two occasions she ran away from treatment facilities — one in Brentwood and one in Minnesota — which resulted in multiple people being charged with rape and other sexual misconduct charges.

The girl was provided with a range of services, including substance abuse counseling, equine therapy, a tutor and personal trainer.

Hot spot for sex trafficking

Andrew Crecca, district administrative judge of the 10th Judicial District, Suffolk County, said in an interview Suffolk County is a "hot spot" for sex trafficking, specifically of children. The number of victims is undercounted because not everyone reports the abuse, he said.

"The most difficult part of this problem is identifying those people who are victims," Crecca said. "So we know that there are significant numbers of victims because we know some of those cases get reported and they are referred for services, and that's how we can sort of see the numbers. But we don't know what the real numbers are."

A 2023 report from the state's Office of Children and Family Services showed 2,253 children were identified as sex trafficking victims. Crecca said those numbers have remained "steady" and the figure in Suffolk is more than 200 children annually.

Last year, Suffolk County opened the state’s first human trafficking court focused on children who have been or are at risk of being trafficked, which Crecca said is part of the county's many "problem-solving courts" that seek to prevent crimes and offer services.

In recent decades, there has been a shift away from prosecuting those who engage in sex work. That move, however, has made it more difficult for authorities to identify the victims of sex trafficking and help them escape abuse.

"The paradigm has shifted over the years; society has recognized that most prostitution, while it's criminal conduct, those people are really victims most often," Crecca said. Authorities and social workers are trying "to find better ways to screen people who are coming into the criminal justice system or even to our family court system, find out if they've been a victim of human trafficking, or at high risk for human trafficking and refer them to services to get them the help they need."

Newsday reported in 2024 that arrests for sex trafficking were down, as the crime has largely went online, making it more difficult for law enforcement to detect, and few victims were referred to services despite a state law mandating services for sex trafficking victims.

Richberg, the Democratic legislative leader, said governments need to elevate their response to sex trafficking on the same level as opioids — create task forces and provide more training for law enforcement to recognize the warning signs. Richberg, also said parents need to be engaged through schools.

"Unfortunately this young lady is scarred for the rest of her life," Richberg said. "And we need to make sure that we surround her with care and support as she goes forward. We can change all the policies in the world, we can increase enforcement. The No. 1 thing is that young lady needs support."

The issue of sex trafficking minors has recently been a major topic across the United States, as the lack of transparency by the Trump administration into the Jeffrey Epstein case has reached a fever pitch.

'Happening right in your backyard'

U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi, from Glen Cove, was among the Democrats on Capitol Hill who advocated for the Department of Justice to release the investigative files in the case of Epstein, a billionaire with a slew of wealthy, powerful and politically connected friends who was arrested in 2019 on federal charges that he sex trafficked minors. He died by suicide in jail a month later.

Watch what U.S. Rep. Suozzi said

"I think that people look at the Epstein story or the other cases that are big right now and think ... oh, it's out there, it's happening with the Wall Street people, or it's happening with the celebrities, or the music industry people," Suozzi said. "And I think the Newsday story bringing it home to Long Islanders says: This is happening right in your backyard. And we need to recognize that this is a very real problem."

Suozzi said the issue should be approached with an emphasis toward awareness — educating young people and their parents of the potential dangers — and enforcement.

"These exploiters, these users, these pedophiles, these degenerates need to be prosecuted and need to be made examples of," Suozzi said.

"A lot of these problems always go back to drug, alcohol and mental health," he said. "We have to figure out how to address these drug, alcohol and mental health issues at a younger age without saying we're just going to do another program, we're going to spend more money."

Legis. Steven Flotteron, a Republican who chairs the legislature's Public Safety Committee, said he wants to work with the police department and sheriff's office on a presentation to bring to schoolchildren to warn them of potential trafficking. He said many school districts are "worried about pushback from parents who don't want that topic in front of their kids," though he said he helped arrange a presentation for parents at the West Islip school district.

"This is a dirty topic," Flotteron said. "You don't want it in front of them [kids]."

As for the Patchogue sex trafficking victim who was missing for 25 days, Flotteron said he's letting CPS, the police department and the district attorney's office conduct their investigations before passing any judgment.

"It's really hard to blame anything," he said. "...CPS is there to help when they get notified, but it's only a certain amount of power they have."