Family says Texas teen facing capital murder charge was being sold for sex by gunman
A 17-year-old girl charged with capital murder in a 2019 robbery was being sold for sex by the man who pulled the trigger, her family says.
Zephaniah “Zephi” Trevino, a junior from Grand Prairie High School, was a pitcher for the Lady Gophers softball team. She had just made the drill team and was looking forward to trying a new sport.
Now she’s facing 40 years in prison in a fatal robbery at Grand Prairie apartment complex.
Her parents, Crystal and Henry Trevino, said their daughter was at the scene only because the gunman — 19-year-old Philip Baldenegro — was selling her for sex to the man who ended up dead.
Zephi has been held without bond at the Henry Wade Juvenile Justice Center in Dallas since August 2019. She is also charged with aggravated battery.
“My daughter’s whole entire life could be gone because she was a victim, because she was there having sex and being forced, and didn’t pull the trigger and didn’t steal anything,” her mother, Crystal Trevino, said Monday.
Baldenegro’s attorney, David Finn, said his client never sold Zephi for sex and that District Attorney John Creuzot is pursing a capital murder case against her because she set up the robbery.
“She’s no victim,” Finn argued. “John Creuzot is a friend of mine, he’s a very reasonable person and the reason they’re going hard on her is because they know she has set it up.”
He said Zephi’s relationship with Baldenegro was that of boyfriend and girlfriend, but that she was at the apartment to have sex with two other men, who were both adults.
Experts say relationships between traffickers and the trafficked often seem innocent on the outside. The shame and guilt is often hidden by the girls, who sometimes don’t recognize that they are victims of a crime. But unlike 30 other states, Texas doesn’t have a state statute that protects a sex trafficking victim from facing charges on a crime committed while they were being trafficked.
The story of what happened that night, and the events leading it up to it, can only be told through the Trevinos and Baldenegro’s defense attorney. Court documents for cases involving minors are closed to the public. Both accounts agree Baldenegro shot and killed a 24-year-old man during a conflict on Aug. 4 and that Zephi was present.
With a legal team backing them, celebrities tweeting about the case and growing media attention, the Trevinos are fighting for their daughter’s life.
And they’re not the only Dallas-Fort Worth family who has gone through this battle.
Seeing the signs
Zephi was a bright girl who had a good future ahead of her, her parents said. She loved her three siblings and shared a room with her sister Tiffani. They were the closest of the bunch and played softball together. Tiffani said their room hasn’t changed since Zephi’s arrest.
But when Zephi was 15, she became involved with a boyfriend who introduced her to drugs and abused her, Crystal Trevino said. When the teens broke up, Zephi never fully recovered from the trauma.
She became more anxious and depressed. She ran away sometimes. Her self-esteem plummeted.
She became the type of girl sex traffickers look for.
“Traffickers are brilliant at looking for the vulnerability in girls that they can then manipulate,” said Vanessa Bouche, an associate professor of political science at TCU and a member of the board of directors for Arcadia North Texas and Traffick911.
While Zephi worked through the trauma left behind by her ex, Trevino said. Baldenegro reached out to her daughter through social media.
“He was introduced to us as a friend,” Trevino said. “He was pretty polite to be honest.”
Baldenegro told the Trevinos that he was 17 — just a year older than Zephi — and that he knew her from Grand Prairie High School.
“Now, we know that he was 18 or 19, much older than we would have allowed her to be around and he didn’t go to her school,” Trevino said.
When they hung out, Zephi told her parents that they would go to the park or the mall. They used an app to track her whereabouts and checked in through texts and calls. But then Baldenegro started bringing Zephi home late.
“That was a red flag for me,” Trevino said.
When Trevino brought this up with Zephi, her daughter said she wasn’t hanging out with Baldenegro anymore. But soon after, she asked her parents if Baldenegro could take her to the movies.
“And he called me and said, ‘You know, can I take her? I’ll bring her back,’” Trevino recalled. She said yes.
Zephi didn’t come home for two days.
The tracking app was deleted and Zephi’s phone was turned off, Trevino said. Her parents made a missing persons report with the Grand Prairie Police Department, which investigated it as a runaway case, dad Henry Trevino said.
When Zephi returned home on her own, Crystal Trevino said she was wearing clothes they didn’t buy her, she seemed to be drugged out and she was starving.
“You know, I saw things, but I didn’t know what they were,” Trevino said. “She was depressed and would just sleep all of the time.”
When her parents tried to press her for what happened, Zephi wouldn’t talk to them. They still don’t know what happened.
Bouche said it’s common for trafficked girls to not seek help. Sometimes, they still live with the parents and go to school — their lives are kept separate.
“The level of guilt and shame that comes with this is debilitating, especially from your parents who you have a good relationship with, and she’s probably hiding it,” she said. “I think if you think about it, we can all identify with that in some way. We’ve all gone through traumatic things and we don’t want to tell anyone and we act like nothing’s wrong when really you’re hurting.”
Ava, a sex trafficking survivor who asked that her last name not be used for safety purposes, said her trafficking also happened right under her mother’s nose.
“My trafficker told me what to say to my family,” she said. “I didn’t identify with the fact that I was being trafficked. My perception was that he loved me and eventually this would all be over and that we’d have a good life. When my mom called me and asked if I was OK, I would put on face and say I was OK.”
Trevino also believes that Zephi was being threatened.
“She would go out and then tell me, ‘Mom, I need you to make sure the security alarm is on, you need to make sure all the doors are locked,’ just weird things,” Trevino said. “That’s how we know he was threatening her and us ... She would do anything to protect her family.”
It wasn’t until Zephi was arrested that her family realized the possible cause behind her odd behavior.
The shooting
Baldenegro shot Carlos Arajeni-Arriaza Morillo twice after Morillo grabbed Zephi around the neck during a scuffle in Morillo’s car, said Finn, Baldenegro’s attorney.
Zephi, Baldenegro, and Jesse Martinez, 19, had gone to Morillo’s apartment to settle a dispute. Zephi said Morillo “ripped her off,” according to Finn. A fight broke out between Baldenegro, Martinez, Morillo and a friend of Morillo’s.
At some point, Zephi grabbed Morillo’s car keys and ran outside, Finn said. Morillo followed her.
The attorney declined to give details about what transpired between Zephi and Morillo before the shooting.
Finn denied that Zephi was a trafficking victim, citing that he prosecuted sex trafficking cases when he was a federal prosecutor and he knows what to look for in those cases.
“It’s absolutely not true,” he said. “If she was being trafficked, it wasn’t by my guy.”
Baldenegro was released from jail on a reduced bond on Tuesday, Finn said. Martinez, who is also charged with capital murder, is being held at the Dallas County Jail on a $1 million bond.
The Grand Prairie Police Department declined to comment because the case is pending investigation and involves a juvenile. The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office said it does not comment on juvenile cases.
Grooming girls
From what she knows about Zephi’s story, Bouche believes that if Baldenegro trafficked Zephi, he would fall under the category of a “romeo pimp.”
“It sounds like he was acting as her boyfriend,” Bouche said, “It can be a slippery slope from there where they spend a couple weeks buttering them up and then say, we can make money doing this. Crazily enough, it doesn’t usually take that long for a romeo pimp to really lure a girl in in terms of capturing her heart and having her be willing to do a lot of things that she wouldn’t ordinarily do.”
Bouche said minors who are involved in commercial sex acts are considered victims under federal law.
Ava, who was 20 when her trafficker found her, said it’s especially hard for teenage girls to recognize what’s happening to them.
“As a child you can’t comprehend that, you’re already living in your trauma and you’re not healed from it,” she said. “I was an addict and had been previously sexually assaulted, so when I met my trafficker, he asked me to open up and I shared those vulnerabilities and he took that and used it against me.”
And leaving a trafficking situation isn’t simple, Ava said.
“The amount of manipulation that my trafficker had over me, I didn’t believe there was any person out there that would help me,” she said. “It was he is my only lifeline.”
Fighting back
Zephi’s story is reminiscent of a 2016 homicide case in Tarrant County that involved a teenager who was a victim of sex trafficking.
In that case, a 16-year-old girl was present during a deadly home invasion in Mansfield. Even though she didn’t pull the trigger, she was convicted of capital murder, accused of plotting the 2016 robbery with six others — including rapper Tay-K 47 — at her boyfriend’s house in Mansfield.
Her defense attorney argued she participated under duress, but prosecutors said that being a victim of sex trafficking didn’t excuse her involvement. The girl won an appeal in 2019 due to a technicality in her sentencing paperwork, was never re-tried and accepted 10 years of probation on a robbery charge.
“That family has reached out to us and said, ‘You’re not alone,’” Crystal Trevino said. “I don’t understand how the justice system could want to make its victims pay for something that they had no control of.”
Zephi’s case has made waves on social media. Kim Kardashian West, who has been a force behind criminal justice reform, tweeted about the case and asked her 66 million followers to sign a petition showing Zephi their support.
Her case has also been picked up by Jason Flom, a music industry executive and founding board member of the Innocence Project.
“The situation in which Zephi has been placed is an atrocious miscarriage of justice,” he said. “The idea that the legal system would hold a child accountable for the crimes of her abuser is simply unthinkable. Any human being with a conscience would agree that Zephi should be back at home with her family and on the path to healing.”
Her parents said it’s great to see the support they’ve received, but in the end, they just want their daughter home and will fight the charges in court. They declined a plea deal that would’ve given Zephi 10 years.
“They were pushing us very hard, saying, ‘You need to let you daughter take this deal,’” Trevino said. “I cannot tell my daughter to say you’re guilty when you didn’t pull the trigger. ... How can I consciously tell my daughter to take a deal that will affect the rest of her life?”
The Trevinos have also had fights within the juvenile system. Every 10 days Zephi shows up in front of a judge, who determines if she can be sent home. Each time, she’s told no.
Henry Trevino said his daughter has not received counseling even though she reported she is a victim of sex trafficking.
Bouche, the trafficking expert, said Zephi should be getting services at the detention facility, based on Texas statute under the Trafficked Persons Program.
“Any trafficking survivor that committed a crime that’s a minor is able to go before a juvenile board for rehabilitation and they are able to essentially get services related to their rehab as a juvenile trafficking survivor and therefore not have to face the penalty of the law,” she said. “They need to be giving her services under the law as a minor trafficking survivor.”
Fighting the system as a whole could be harder, but Bouche said it’s possible.
“The state of Texas needs to have an affirmative defense statute,” she said, explaining that the statute — which 30 states have — provides victims of sex trafficking a defense if they’re involved of a crime during their victimization.
“She did not commit the murder, the boyfriend confessed that, why she’s being charged with capital murder is beyond me,” Bouche said.
This story was originally published August 5, 2020 at 2:27 PM.
