A missing Long Island girl. 23 arrested in two states. Inside a hidden world of drugs and sex trafficking.

It was 6:19 a.m. on the first day of fall 2023, and the 13-year-old Long Island girl was nowhere to be found.

One night earlier, she was upset. By morning, her bedroom was empty, her cellphone abandoned among her teddy bears and makeup. 

Her father, Frank Gervasi, searched his Patchogue neighborhood for clues. He asked a neighbor if his Ring doorbell camera had picked up the girl's departure. It had not.

"He was concerned," the neighbor recalled.

There had been signs for a while that something was wrong. She had been bouncing between her divorced parents' homes — her mother, Melissa Dervay, filed for divorce when she was 4 — and was staying in a house where her father and stepmother, Alyson Gervasi, had produced amateur porn posted to Pornhub, an adult website.

The girl showed a video of her father and stepmother engaged in a sex act to her seventh grade friends at a middle school in Patchogue, a former classmate said.

The girl was new to the school, but she made friends fast. A former classmate said she bonded with her because they disliked the same girl.

"She was cool. She was funny. She had a lot of energy," the former classmate said.

But the girl's time at the school was cut short. Her behavior at school was so disruptive, a family member said, that she was assigned to at-home schooling. 

Earlier that year, she was allegedly introduced to crack cocaine by a man more than three times her age who went by "Ace."

Danny St. Louis, who was 42 years old at the time, and is alleged to have trafficked women, was the person who picked up the girl that fall night.

Gervasi previously told St. Louis to stay away from his daughter because she was just 13, St. Louis told police.

"Worry about your own [expletive]," St. Louis said, when the father confronted him over the phone about contacting his daughter.

But on that September morning, St. Louis’ cellphone was a lead for law enforcement searching for the girl. A pinging cell tower suggested he was less than five miles away from the girl's home, at the Comfort Inn on Route 112 in Medford, where police would soon find her.

It would not be the last time police would discover the child victim in a room allegedly rented for her by St. Louis, who has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and rape charges involving the girl and two women.

In December, the girl, who Newsday is not naming because she is a victim of both alleged and adjudicated sex crimes, drew national attention when her 25-day disappearance ended after her father found her aboard a dilapidated yacht in Islip.

At a time when many teenage girls are shopping with friends, juggling middle school and relishing first crushes, this now-15-year-old knows the rush of crack cocaine smoke in her lungs and the trauma of being raped by older men. After the weekslong disappearance and rescue, 23 people in two states have faced charges related to the victim. Three men on Long Island are facing the possibility of life in prison.

Since January, when news of the girl's rescue broke, Newsday has obtained hundreds of pages of court records, police reports, official sworn statements and investigative records related to a dozen criminal cases in which the girl is an alleged victim. Reporters have interviewed dozens of people with knowledge of the girl, her disappearances and the criminal charges that followed.

This story challenges deeply held beliefs about sex trafficking across the country. In this case, a diffuse web of men and women — some drawn by chance, most driven by street drugs and opportunism — underscore the insidious nature of trafficking on Long Island, which is often hidden in plain sight. It also highlights a social services and legal system that so far have failed the girl at every turn.

"It is unusual in terms of the scale of it," Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said of the yacht case his office is prosecuting. "It's a more extreme example of things that go on, but it's not the only case like this. It's not the only time that this is happening in this county or other counties in New York State or across the country."

More than 30 Suffolk hotels and motels have been used for trafficking women and children, according to Investigative Sgt. Erin Meunkle, who works with trafficking victims in the Suffolk jail.

Although it is difficult to quantify the number of victims because of trafficking's hidden nature, a program created by Suffolk County Sheriff Errol Toulon Jr. has identified 361 victims and 225 traffickers since 2019.

The jail has no numbers on minors because it only houses people 18 and older, but investigators have determined from interviews that victims are first trafficked between the ages of 12 and 14.

Toulon said when factoring in minors who have not been arrested, there may be "two or three more times" the number of total victims. Anyone who is under 18 and involved in commercial sex is automatically considered a trafficking victim.

The problem of trafficking minors on Long Island is so serious that Suffolk County created the state's first court dedicated to trafficked children in June 2024, handling 59 cases since. They have professionals in court who are experienced in working with children and trafficking victims to refer them to services. Advocates in Nassau and Suffolk counties who work with trafficked minors say they get between 150 and 200 referrals for services a year.

Failed protection

State officials confirmed the Patchogue girl as a sex trafficking victim when she was 14. Under New York State law, people who are confirmed as sex trafficking victims are entitled to legal assistance, emergency housing, mental health care and job training and placement.

The Suffolk County Probation office worked with Gervasi to help keep closer track of his daughter. He monitored her phone usage and added restrictions to prevent her from adding social media accounts.

The girl often expressed to caseworkers and acquaintances how this heightened level of control over her life frustrated her. Gervasi upset caseworkers assigned to protect her by loosening boundaries, sometimes allowing her to arrive late for lessons or miss days from her home-schooling.

The probation department assigned the girl a GPS ankle monitor. Six weeks before her December disappearance, she removed the monitor and was found in a house just a block away.

Twice she ran away from treatment facilities — one in Brentwood and later from one more than 1,300 miles away in St. Cloud, Minnesota, about an hour north of Minneapolis, where her family attempted to get her help.

Adults were arrested for rape and other criminal sexual conduct both times she left the facilities.

A probation officer who worked with trafficking victims introduced the family to a case manager from EAC Network's Safe Harbour, a nonprofit program that offers services for sexually exploited children.

Substance abuse counseling, equine therapy, tutoring and a personal trainer were all prescribed to help her.

Some of the girl's service providers found the time she spent at a Rocky Point equine therapy farm, where her father also helped out, particularly troubling. There were reports that men over 20 years old were hanging out with his daughter and that she was given alcohol and THC, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis. Gervasi had pushed for the horse farm over more traditional counseling for his daughter.

Stephanie Biondi, owner of the horse therapy operation, declined to comment.

Some services were discontinued on Nov. 27 — 12 days before she disappeared — due to EAC's concerns over a lack of follow-through by the girl's father.

Frank Gervasi

A muscular man who preaches daily 5 a.m. workouts, Frank Gervasi cuts an imposing figure to those who encounter him. "Sinner," reads one of the first tattoos he had inked on his now covered face. "Outlaw" is the word that arches over his belly.

A thick, graying beard that at times hangs below his chest adds another layer to the 49-year-old father's style. An employee of his family's second-generation auto body shop in East Setauket, Gervasi also owns a mobile auto detailing business.

He boasted to his family that he was a member of biker clubs, including the Hells Angels, and posted photos of himself with bikers on social media. But the president of the Long Island chapter of the Hells Angels said Gervasi was never a member.

"He has nothing to do with us," Mario Biganini said. "In our motorcycle world, we don't like storytellers. We like people who are real."

Gervasi did join one Long Island motorcycle club, the Abbadons Soldiers, but lasted only a few weeks. He would be at a meeting and get a call and would rush home. "He was having family issues," club president Mark Weiss said.

A self-described "spiritual gangster" and "positive mindset warrior," Gervasi promotes his interests on his LongBeard1975 Instagram account with posts about his work, classic cars and fitness.

A deeper look into Gervasi's online persona reveals a highly sexual lifestyle.

Soon after his daughter went missing in December, people following the story pointed out that Gervasi promoted live sex shows he and his wife, Alyson, would perform on the adult website Pornhub. The phone number he gave for people to contact him if they encountered his daughter popped up on a message board for a West Babylon adult entertainment club and peep show, where he recruited voyeurs to watch him engage in sex with his wife.

Gervasi's Pornhub account, longgun75, had nearly 1,000 subscribers and over 90,000 views of about a half-dozen videos of the couple having sex at home and in public at a local parking lot and bathroom. The page also advertised live sex shows on FaceTime and in person and promoted an account on OnlyFans, an online subscription service known for its explicit user created sexual content. The videos were removed after the media attention the page received this winter, though several graphic images of the couple remain.

Some of the videos on the website were filmed in rooms in the house visible in the girl's social media posts and in images shared with media when she went missing in December.

Feride Castillo, director of programming and education for ECLI-VIBES, a nonprofit in Islandia that works with victims of sex trafficking, said raising a child in a highly sexualized environment could be a form of abuse. 

"If you're growing up in a home that's sexualized, children pick up on that," she said. "Adults don't do a good job of hiding things. Children always know something's off."

The exposure to sex doesn't have to be direct, and children tend to internalize abuse and blame themselves, which can lead them to engage in inappropriate behavior, Castillo said.

"Normalizing this behavior essentially does exactly that — it normalizes it," she said. "You don't look at it like it's taboo. You don't look at it like it's not OK. You don't look at it like it could be potentially dangerous."

Brandon Keezer

Brandon Keezer was 19 when he was charged with statutory rape of the girl — who was then 12 — two years before her disappearance and discovery on the yacht.

On his own since his teens, he became affiliated with the Crips street gang. His Instagram page is filled with photos of him throwing gang signs and showing off guns. In one gun photo, he appears to be bragging about being ready to kill his adversaries.

He and the girl met around 11 p.m. one night at a restaurant and bar in Patchogue, Keezer said in an email from prison. She was with some older friends he knew. He said they clicked immediately.

The relationship was no secret. Gervasi knew about it, Keezer and his father said.

William Keezer, of Mastic Beach, said he warned his son the girl might not be as old as he believed. She had told him she was 18, he said.

"She did not look 18 to me," William recalled telling his son.

The two were "head over heels for each other," William said. Brandon took her everywhere. Whenever she and Gervasi fought, he would pick her up, William said.

They were together for at least a year. It all changed when Brandon and the girl were heard on a home surveillance video from a camera in her bedroom talking about running away together. Gervasi reported the relationship to police, Brandon Keezer said. He was charged with second-degree rape and sexual abuse.

Keezer pleaded guilty last April to child sex abuse and possessing dangerous prison contraband for multiple incidents after correction officers found him with a sharpened toothbrush at the Suffolk County jail.

While Keezer was jailed, the victim, who was then 13, and his uncle Daniel Keezer, then 39, of Mastic Beach, were in contact.

"Daniel FaceTimed me repeatedly requesting that I get naked," the girl told Suffolk County Police Officer Michelle Knudsen as her stepmother sat at her side in April 2023.

The victim said the uncle claimed he would put money in Brandon's inmate account if she did this.

So that Friday, at around 10:30 a.m., the girl answered a FaceTime call from the uncle, who was more than 25 years her senior. She asked if she could stop fulfilling his graphic requests. He said, "No."

After about five minutes, he hung up.

He also requested she send sexually explicit videos of herself.

Seventeen months later, Daniel Keezer stood before acting Suffolk Supreme Court Justice Karen Wilutis, the same judge handling the case of 11 defendants indicted following the victim's December disappearance, and pleaded guilty to a felony count of promoting a sexual performance by a child. He was sentenced to 10 years' probation with drug, alcohol and computer monitoring and, like his nephew, required to register as a sex offender.

"He acknowledged that he was aware that she was not over the age of 17 when she sent him sexually explicit videos," said his defense attorney, Steven Politi.

Probation has not gone well for either Keezer.

Daniel was accused of a violation for allegedly threatening his assigned probation officer. He is being housed at the Suffolk County jail while the matter is pending in court.

Brandon repeatedly failed to report to his probation officer or for drug treatment. In July 2024, he was caught taking unprescribed anxiety medication. He admitted to drinking alcohol two months later.

His case manager reported that he violated the terms of his probation at least 16 different times following his release.

He is now serving a 1-to-3-year sentence at Bare Hill Correctional Facility in upstate Malone, a little over 30 miles from the Canadian border near Montreal. He is eligible for parole in December. Acting Suffolk Supreme Court Justice Stephen Pilewski has issued a permanent order preventing him from making contact with the victim.

Brandon Keezer wrote in an email to a Newsday reporter that Gervasi "knew my age since day [expletive] one. He told me his daughter was two years younger than me." Gervasi declined to comment when contacted repeatedly by Newsday.

He said Gervasi initially approved of the relationship because his daughter seemed calmer around him.

"We would smoke and talk about everything under the sun," he wrote. "She was my other half, like really the female version of me. We talked about life, kids, a future and the whole nine."

Although he said he was "framed" and in prison because of the victim, he could never be mad at her: "When she was around me, she was funny, smart, caring and to be honest just herself. She showed me a side that not everybody got to see."

"She's just a hurt soul," he wrote.

Sex trafficking on Long Island

On the night of July 15, 2023, police stopped St. Louis for not wearing a seat belt.

Police allegedly found cocaine in his possession.

About a month earlier, Gervasi notified police that he believed a man he knew as "Ace" had been providing his daughter with drugs. He told Suffolk Police Officer Lucas Moeller that he'd already filed numerous reports about his daughter "meeting questionable characters" and wanted her relationship with St. Louis to be documented as well.

When he was stopped, St. Louis had four cellphones in his possession, prosecutors have said. One of the phones allegedly had three sexually explicit videos of the girl.

Suffolk County police opened a human trafficking investigation.

By the time St. Louis was charged with sex trafficking in a pair of indictments in April and September 2024, prosecutors allege he had engaged in criminal sexual activity with at least two adult women and the child victim.

A 20-year-old woman reported that St. Louis kept her in a room at the Radisson Hotel in Hauppauge, where he and co-defendant Samantha Wimmer had been staying. The two were allegedly giving the woman crack cocaine and held her captive for more than two days in hopes of trafficking her in March 2024.

At one point, St. Louis accused the woman of stealing crack from him. He stripped her down, made her shower and then allegedly raped her while Wimmer filmed. The pair discussed the video being an advertisement for the young woman's services, prosecutors said.

After two days, the 20-year-old escaped to call her family, who reported the incident to police.

St. Louis and Wimmer were arrested after Wimmer offered sex and drugs to an undercover officer in exchange for money a week later.

Another woman, whose age prosecutors did not release, alleged she was trafficked by St. Louis and Wimmer and told police the money men paid for sex would go to St. Louis, who gave her crack cocaine and fentanyl to keep her working.

Wimmer's attorney, Peter Mayer, said, following an April court appearance, that St. Louis is "the real bad guy here."

"He's the person who was trafficking these innocent victims, and I think my client was caught up in it," the Hauppauge attorney said.

In response to a letter from Newsday, St. Louis declined to grant an interview, saying he was worried about the father and people getting to him in jail.

Meunkle, who heads the Suffolk County Sheriff's Anti-Trafficking Task Force, told a committee of county legislators in February that sex trafficking here often involves a "group of criminals" renting multiple hotel rooms at one location.

"They're selling drugs out of one room and they're selling people out of another room and they're just partying in another room collecting the money," Meunkle told the legislature.

Suffolk police found the girl in a dingy motel room at the Bay Shore Inn in the early morning of Oct. 9, 2023.

A day earlier she left a treatment facility where she was taken after being found at the Comfort Inn in Medford two weeks earlier.

After leaving the facility, the girl said she stopped at the first house she saw and asked to use a phone. St. Louis was on the receiving end of the call.

He booked an Uber rideshare to take her to the motel.

St. Louis told police he "had feelings" for the 13-year-old.

When she arrived at the Bay Shore motel, which offered a $65 three-hour rate, St. Louis showed the girl her room. He ordered them chicken from a nearby Chinese restaurant and left for another room occupied by Wimmer.

He allegedly returned with crack cocaine for the child victim to smoke several times before police arrived the following day.

"I do not wish to press charges against Danny," the girl told Det. Joseph Collins, though he ultimately was arrested.

Trafficking experts say that victims of abuse often experience "trauma bonding," which is developing emotional attachments to their abusers.

Meunkle said narcotics and weapons dealers often resort to sex trafficking because it can be more profitable. She estimated a kilogram of cocaine might earn a drug dealer $32,000 in profit, but a single sex trafficking victim can bring in $180,000 per year.

"A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be sold once, whereas humans can be sold 10 to 15 times a day," Meunkle said.

Trafficking people also brings less risk than drug dealing because the legal penalties are far less severe. Moreover, there are fewer arrests. New York State data shows that arrests of sex workers and sex buyers have declined dramatically in the last decade. Experts say that is due in part to the recognition that many sex workers are victims themselves.

Carlee Michelback, 33, of Central Islip, was 14 years old when she began using drugs. Smoking weed led to snorting cocaine and popping pills. Percocet prescribed to her in her early 20s after she delivered a child by Caesarean-section morphed into heroin addiction, she said.

Her drug use pushed her more into exchanging sex for money, something she had been doing since she was 19.

"Having someone that I don't know walk in the door and having to take my clothes off and do whatever they wanted to do ... it's just not a good feeling," she said in an interview at the Suffolk County jail in March, weeks before she was released from serving a 90-day sentence for criminal possession of stolen property. 

Her two sons and a daughter, all between 8 and 12 years old, have long been out of her life, taken away to be raised in the foster system. She is not allowed to contact them.

Hearing about the Patchogue child trafficking victim stirred up emotions for Michelback.

"When you're 14 years old, you're not able to make a decision like that," she said. "Somebody should be offering her help and trying to get her out of that lifestyle and not wanting to do drugs."

Social media attention

Gervasi pressed record on his cellphone camera Dec. 29 and continued driving in search of his daughter. The videos had become a daily practice the week before.

The Facebook and Instagram posts spread across Long Island with hundreds, and sometimes thousands, liking or sharing the content.

The videos revealed the basic details of how a 14-year-old girl left her house at 5 p.m. on Dec. 9 wearing no shoes or a coat. A surveillance camera at the house showed her entering a sedan. She was last seen at a motel in Bohemia.

Anyone who knew of her whereabouts was warned by her father to hope police find them first.

"She's a beautiful, smart little girl that's had some trouble throughout her life," Gervasi said in his gravelly voice as he looked ahead out of the windshield of the moving vehicle. "You know, a lot of trauma, that, she's hurting inside. And, you know, as much as I've been trying to get her help and do what I need to do as a dad, she still manages sometimes to run away from her problems."

In the 25 days she was missing, the father's posts became a sensation, leading to a volunteer search party and missing-person posters plastered along Suffolk's South Shore. Followers began to create their own videos and even songs about the victim.

"All of Long Island stands tall for you," the lyrics of one country-western song began. "Your father's love has woven through. Strangers unite in a vision so true. We got a search team just for you."

At that time, Gervasi told Newsday about the attention he was getting: "I've got news companies calling me from all over the world."

'Drugs play a big role'

Young women and girls who have suffered physical and mental abuse or are dealing with drug addiction are often targeted by sex traffickers who are "very quick in identifying a vulnerability in their victims," Toulon said.

"They want to be in a different place in their life and now all of a sudden there's someone who could potentially get them there, which is really not the case," the sheriff said. "They're going down a rabbit hole that is going to take them many years to recover" from.

Tierney said the more vulnerabilities, the more a potential trafficker can exploit.

"Drugs play a big role in that," the district attorney said.

But Castillo, the trafficking victim advocate, said she considers human resilience a "superpower."

"I have seen people come out of the darkest situations and turn their lives around completely," she said.

Prosecutors from Tierney's office have outlined in court various ways the 11 defendants charged in the yacht case indictment are alleged to have preyed on the girl's vulnerabilities. Drugs played a role in nearly all of them.

Within days of the victim's disappearance, Alton Harrell, a 35-year-old from Bellport, was identified by police as the man who picked her up from her house on Dec. 9.

Harrell told police in an interview at the Fifth Precinct on Dec. 14 that he had been talking with the girl on Snapchat since January.

That is the platform they used to connect on the day she disappeared.

The girl used her stepmom's phone and logged into Snapchat that afternoon. The 35-year-old then parked beyond the privacy hedges of the Patchogue home, where she got in, tossing away her ankle monitor as they left the neighborhood around 5 p.m., she told police.

Prosecutors allege this isn't the first time Harrell picked the victim up from her house. Sometime more than nine months earlier, he picked her up after she jumped out of a second-floor window and drove her to a waterfront parking lot in Bellport, where he allegedly had sex with her and provided her with drugs.

Statements given to police about what happened the first night the victim spent away from her house in December don't all line up. Harrell said they parked outside a vacant house on Doane Avenue in North Bellport and talked for hours. She told him about her father and how controlling he was. He told her to go home and thought she had when he returned to his car after using the bathroom and found her gone around 11 p.m., he told police.

The victim told police they climbed into the vacant house through a back window. He put down an air mattress on the floor, where he had sex with her and smoked crack.

"I didn't want to," she told Det. Sgt. Lauren Ventura after she was found Jan. 3, but she said she didn't have money for drugs.

Harrell eventually left the barefoot girl behind at the house, taking her necklace, according to prosecutors.

Assistant Suffolk County District Attorney Dana Castaldo told Judge Wilutis that Harrell's actions "set the entire chain of events that followed in motion."

"Every day after that [14-year-old] was missing was a day that she was victimized," Castaldo told the court.

Just like in St. Cloud, Minnesota, where four men have pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct after she fled a rehab facility, four men on Long Island are charged with raping the victim in the first week she was missing. They all lived within 25 miles of her home and ranged in age from 20 to 64.

The men in both states allege the victim told them she was 18 or older.

And in the way alleged sex trafficker St. Louis once put her up in a grubby motel room in Bay Shore, 64-year-old Daniel Burke is accused of stashing the victim in his mobile home on Valley Forge Drive in Bohemia, where they smoked crack and recorded her performing sex acts, leading to charges of kidnapping, rape and using a child in a sexual performance, prosecutors have said.

There was no running water inside Burke's trailer or in the detached garage behind the Islip home of his friend Robert Eccleston, 61, where prosecutors allege the victim was brought next.

Looking at Eccleston's mug shot, with his white stubble and graying light-colored hair hanging from his receding hairline down to his shoulders, Sophie Anabtawi said he normally looked more disheveled.

Anabtawi, a clerk at Wines on Main in Bay Shore, said Eccleston would regularly ride his electric bike to pick up a bottle of brandy from the store, where the victim said he and Burke brought her for a bottle of rum in December.

Like many other Long Islanders, Anabtawi followed the girl's disappearance closely in the news.

She called it "shocking," "heartbreaking" and "disgusting" to learn a regular customer was involved.

The yacht was docked just a half-mile from the store.

"It's really scary knowing it's so close to home," Anabtawi said.

Francis Buckheit's yacht

The Phoenix stood out among the vessels at White Cap Marina in Islip.

The 56-foot yacht was manufactured by Ocean Alexander Marine in 1988 at one of the many shipbuilding yards in Kaohsiung, Taiwan.

At 18 feet wide and 11 feet deep, it holds a kitchen, dining room, living room, three bathrooms and four bedrooms.

Once called Leading Lady and docked in Arlington, Texas, the 74-ton yacht's star has shone less brightly.

Owner Francis Buckheit, who purchased the vessel nearly two decades ago and first floated it in the warm waters off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, kept it at marinas in Bay Shore and Lindenhurst in recent years.

The exterior of The Phoenix was still capable of making a strong first impression, cutting a commanding presence in the channel off Great Cove this winter. The interior, however, was unkempt and filthy, said people who saw it.

While some similarly sized and aged craft maintain a value of a quarter-million dollars or more in today's resale market, one person familiar with the current condition of the yacht questioned if it had much worth.

"It's a piece of [expletive]," he said.

When Eccleston allegedly brought the victim on his motorbike to the marina just over a mile from his house on Dec. 13, he was greeted by Buckheit, 64, of East Islip, and 34-year-old Elizabeth Hunter, an Islip woman who told police she regularly smoked crack on the yacht over the past three years, according to prosecutors and a statement Hunter gave police.

Hunter said Buckheit, a wiry man with graying hair and sunken cheeks, was "taking a liking" to the victim in the week Hunter was on the yacht with them.

"He started to fall for her," Hunter told investigators in an interview before her arrest.

Buckheit had sex with the victim several times, hoping to get her pregnant, the girl told police. Prosecutors alleged he had plans to sail with her to the Carolinas.

Buckheit took the girl with him to The Landing Strip, a gentleman's club tucked away in a Ronkonkoma industrial complex, and out in his Mack truck, which he used to make deliveries for a pool company, the victim told police. He allegedly purchased a cellphone her father told a television interviewer she used once during her disappearance to say "I love you" before quickly hanging up.

Prosecutors allege that, along with Hunter and 52-year-old friend Jacquelyn Comiskey, Buckheit saw an opportunity to market the girl for sex, leading to child sex trafficking charges for all three.

Within hours of her arrival on the yacht, Hunter allegedly photographed the girl nude. The photos were sent to at least four men, prosecutors have said.

Three men identified as dealers by law enforcement are accused of trading drugs for sex with the victim during her weeks on the yacht, each charged with statutory rape. One of those alleged incidents occurred on the vessel, another at a house in Amityville and the third at a residence in Copiague, where Comiskey brought the victim to score crack, prosecutors have said.

A fourth accused drug dealer is charged with attempting to rape the girl.

Gervasi, who offered a $15,000 reward for information leading to his daughter's discovery, has made brief comments but declined repeated requests for an interview. In one call, he said prosecutors have advised him not to speak with the press, as he did often while his daughter was missing. Another time Gervasi, who has informed Suffolk County of his intent to file a lawsuit related to his daughter, said he needed to check with his attorney.

"What do you do when you have a kid in this situation?" he asked a Newsday reporter in an April phone call.

Dervay, the girl's mother, also declined to comment as she stood, petite with dark, shoulder-length hair and black-rimmed glasses, outside a courtroom in February.

"I can't protect her right now, and it's heartbreaking to say the least," the mother, a special-education teacher's assistant, said in an interview with Greaterlongisland.com while her daughter was still missing in December.

Maternal grandmother Karen Dervay told Newsday reporters who visited the house she shares with her daughter and grandsons that her granddaughter's ordeal is a "very difficult situation."

"There's a lot of falsehoods out there," the grandmother said.

The girl's family had high hopes for her at an early age.

Growing up, family members were sure she would be a doctor or an astronaut, or even president. High-spirited and smart, she could do whatever she set her mind to. "Anything she touched, she picked up," her uncle Doug Dervay said.

John Saladino, of Bellmore, a former boyfriend of Melissa Dervay, recalled spending days at a time searching for the girl during earlier disappearances and the toll that took on the family.

"[Melissa is] dealing with a child who has an addiction, or had addiction, and had all these problems with these older men that have abused her," Saladino said. "I can't imagine how she feels and ... how she wishes she could help her child."

'It's not about the white van'

On the morning of Jan. 3, Gervasi received the call he had been hoping for.

Comiskey, seeking the reward money, called the cellphone number he had been sharing and told him he could find her on the yacht at White Cap Marina, prosecutors have said. She then called Suffolk police, who found the father and daughter together when they arrived minutes after he did.

In a 45-minute interview with television personality Dr. Phil, Gervasi said his daughter was alone on the yacht that morning.

"'Dad, oh my God, I can't believe you found me,' " he recalled her saying. "We both hugged each other, we cried. And it was an absolutely beautiful moment."

One media outlet called the rescue a "'Taken'-style plot," referring to the series of Liam Neeson movies in which a former government operative repeatedly rescues his trafficked daughter.

Meunkle, in her presentation to the legislature weeks after the rescue, said that while "Taken" is what most people think of when the topic of sex trafficking comes up, there is "no Liam Neeson running around with a special set of skills."

She said highly publicized cases like those of Jeffrey Epstein and Sean "Diddy" Combs, or reports of vans packed with people, aren't the norm here either.

"A lot of what we see is people with drug abuse issues," Meunkle said.

Tierney said cooperation between Suffolk agencies has led to more child sex trafficking arrests, but the investigations are not easy.

"It is one of these crimes that is really lurking under the surface and really difficult to prosecute and learn about," Tierney said.

Meunkle said a "three-pronged approach" is needed to combat sex trafficking.

"Treatment, enforcement and awareness," she said. "It takes all three really."

But there are obstacles to overcome, specifically when it comes to treatment. Victims can often be resistant to receiving treatment. And safe housing is limited, she said.

The awareness component could be better served by mandated sex trafficking curriculum in schools.

"Education is the best way to reduce the risk of human trafficking," she said, noting that California, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia all require school staff to receive formal training aimed at stopping human trafficking.

"I really do think early education is key because maybe some kids will say, 'I learned about that. That's what's going on.'"

Rachel Foster, co-founder of the antitrafficking organization World Without Exploitation, agreed. Education is especially important considering how much younger kids are now using smartphones, being exposed to social media and instant messaging, and accessing pornography, she said.

"Now, probably the most dangerous place to be is in your room alone with your device because it's as if the doors to your home and your children's room were just cast wide open," Foster said.

And kids need to know what grooming looks like, she said.

"How are we not educating our kids?" Foster asked. "We have to tell them that it's not about somebody snatched off the street. It's not about the white van, or somebody who's in another country being brought in. This is happening in these sort of benign ways. It's like an incremental ensnarement."

Indicators for human trafficking include signs of physical trauma and withdrawn behavior, Meunkle said. Children who run away, struggle with addiction or have significantly older romantic partners can also be showing signs, though not necessarily proof, of human trafficking, she added.

'Capitalized on vulnerabilities'

After spending five days at Stony Brook University Hospital following her rescue, the girl was sent to Sagamore Children's Psychiatric Center in Dix Hills for additional treatment.

Three weeks later, the victim alleged to Suffolk Police Det. Adolfo Berrios that on her first day at the facility, Deshaun McClean, an employee tasked with supervising her, grabbed and squeezed her backside.

Over the next 19 days, the sexual behavior allegedly escalated, she said.

McClean, 43, of Dix Hills, was arrested Feb. 3 and pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.

In May, Darryl Joyner, a state worker at the juvenile facility where the girl was moved, was accused of offering the victim drugs in exchange for seeing her nude. Joyner, 57, pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child at his arraignment June 19.

Of the 23 criminal defendants charged in relation to the victim in the past two years, six have pleaded guilty. Brandon Keezer and DeAndre Hooker, a 45-year-old homeless man who did drugs with the victim and was charged with criminal sexual conduct in Minnesota, are serving state prison sentences.

St. Louis, Wimmer and all but one of the defendants from the yacht case remain in Suffolk County jails pending trial. They have all pleaded not guilty.

Buckheit, Harrell and Burke all face the possibility of life in prison if convicted of first-degree kidnapping. Eccleston has been charged with second-degree kidnapping, and Hunter and Comiskey are facing child sex trafficking charges, which carry a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years behind bars.

Eight defendants were charged with raping the victim. A ninth faces an attempted rape charge.

Castaldo, who is prosecuting each of the victim's Long Island cases along with fellow Assistant District Attorney Zachary Kelly, told the judge at a February arraignment the defendants "capitalized on the vulnerabilities of a 14-year-old child for their own personal gain."

In remarks made inside and outside the courtroom, defense attorneys disputed the kidnapping charges and, in most cases, said their client believed the victim was older. They accused her of being a willing participant.

Castillo, the trafficking victim advocate, said a 14-year-old is not capable of controlling her impulses.

"They don't have high reasoning, being able to look at something and question whether it's safe, because that part of the brain is not developed," Castillo said, adding that trauma stunts development.

The victim turned 15 in February.

She is at a juvenile detention facility on Long Island — not unlike the one in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, where she was sent a year ago after running away from a drug-treatment center there, where her family hoped that it would change her life.

If you or someone you know needs help, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call 1-888-373-7888 or text "HELP" or "INFO" to 233733 (BEFREE) to connect with trained antitrafficking hotline advocates who can offer support and resources. You can also chat online at humantraffickinghotline.org/chat. Locally, ECLI-VIBES offers a 24-hour Hopeline with counselors providing crisis support and other services at 631-360-3606. EAC Safe Harbour advocates assist children who have been sexually exploited or who are at risk at 631-439-0480. If you believe someone is in immediate danger, call 911.