 Good afternoon, everyone. The information is graphic, I'm going to talk about today. I'm going to try to keep it PG. But anybody, when you hear the true details of what happened, will make you sick and disturbed. I ask everybody, first and foremost, to pray for the victim in this case. Pray for the victims we have not identified yet. We know there's other people out there. We're trying to get them. And we ask our God Almighty to give them the courage to come forward. For the investigators that investigate this crime, I want to say thank you to them, too. You can't go into this, into what they saw, into what they investigated. I mean, it's in the pits of hell. And then come back and be normal. But like Detective Weaver said, if not us, who will. And I also want to thank the victim in this case who came forward for her courage. She saved other people. So I want to thank her for that. The other one, too, is our Attorney General, Ashley Moody, here with us today. General Moody has been a strong advocate fighting human trafficking, fighting for victims. And even in that room, we were just in discussing things. She was actually, you know, from a 360 point of view, saying, hey, how do we coordinate anything together? So I think that's a lot of time people don't recognize that. You know, what goes on behind the scenes. But General Moody's in the trenches, finding out, hey, how can we improve the situation because it's about the victim. Everything circles around the victim, as she said. You know, I want to thank the members of the Pascua Sheriff's Office, you know, our analysts, detectives, patrol deputies. Everybody was involved, outstanding work they did. With FDLE, Mark Rootnell, the Special Agent in charge of Tampa, he's led coordinated efforts saying, hey, this is what we need to do to work together and break down those silos. So I want to thank Mark for that. And the Clay County Sheriff's Office, I know Director McKinney's here. Clay County, when we needed their help and said, hey, we have the suspect who's in your county, they jumped up, said, wherever you need us, we're going to be there. So I want to thank Clay County very much for that and the leadership up there. Statewide prosecutor, Nick Cox. Rita Peters, who's a prosecutor at office. I can tell you, when we know Rita's on the case, we know there will be justice. So thank you, Rita, very much for that. And Ms. Kim Figuero, I apologize, I mispronounced her name, but she's more to life, the victim advocate group. In these cases, I know everybody's like, oh, law enforcement, you got it, you're going to take care of it. But for these victims, they've been traumatized, they've been through horrible situations. And so without them, without the victim advocate, able to get them to open up to us and trust other people besides the predator that makes the case. So I'm going to start in April of 2023. The victim had run away from her school, patrol deputies responded, they found her. And at what point she started saying, well, I'm going to go find this adult male, that's where I'm going to. Because of the training our members go through to fight human trafficking, they recognize there's something absolutely wrong here. So that's when they call on major crimes to handle the investigation. So major crime steps in, but I'm going to back up to December of 2022. So in December of 2022, the victim, she's 15, about 116 years old. She meets the suspect. His name is Randy Colfelt. They met on a social media site called Chat Avenue. They go on Chat Avenue, they're on a side chat, but then they decide to go to a private chat in the corner. And let me explain to us, the victim's around 15, 16 at this time. Randy Colfelt is a 44 year old male. During this conversation, they start talking. Randy starts to manipulate her through these conversations to the fact that the victim believes that he loves her. They're kind of like a boyfriend, girlfriend situation. And she wants to make him happy. She's, I'm looking for love. I want somebody to make me happy. If I want to point something out, from the very beginning of their conversations when they first start speaking, the victim says, hey, I just want to let you know I'm 15 years old. And he goes, that's okay. I like them young. From the very beginning, a 44 year old male knows this is a 15 year old. And he says, I don't care. You know, this is where this tragedy just keeps going out of control. Randy Colfelt then gets naked pictures of the victims. He then starts pushing them out there trying to get other pedophiles out there. And so what Randy Colfelt started doing was manipulating the whole situation. He had naked pictures of the victim. He then started posting on social media site for other pedophiles to go out there and other scumbags to start looking at. Then his plan was that he was gonna have them make videos with this girl. He was soliciting her out. Now, Randy is up in Clay County and down here in Pasco County, he's soliciting this 15 year old girl to have sex with people to make videos. So that's what he was doing. So he was set him up. He'd say, hey, look, I want you to make this video. And then he was putting on a website called Adult Friend Finder. And I guess on this site, there's a $30 charge to get in and then you can charge additionally to watch these videos. But it's basically this is child pornography that they're setting up and they're putting on these sites. And so, you know, as he's going through this, this girl's now 16 years old and so men start showing up to her house. On March 19th of 2023, Randy Kofelt arranged for 69 year old Sydney Smith to have sexual intercourse with the 16 year old victim. Sydney Smith picks her up at her house. They drive to Sydney's house. He's getting her drunk at that place. They start videotaping it. But this is how sick this whole situation is. Randy Kofelt starts telling the victim, yeah, you're not doing it right. This is what I want you to do. I don't wanna get into details of it. It's horrible. But he's basically directing what's going on. He's getting upset with her. And at one point he says, if you're not gonna do what I tell you, I'll just find other girls. So you just see a 44 year old male manipulating this 16 year old little girl. On March 19th of March 20th, 33 year old Brandon Sarno was picked up the victim at her house. Brandon Sarno went to the woods with her. They started using drugs. He then pulls out his cell phone as if he's gonna record, but then he says, oh my recording didn't work. Which of course the main suspect in this case gets upset about. But I'm gonna point out two things. One is Brandon Sarno was arrested in 2013 for similar style charges under an FDLE sting. FDLE did their job, but unfortunately this suspect, his criminal scumbag was back out on the street and he did it again. The other part is we believe that he was street smart. He knew that he had made that video and then sent it to Randy. That would have been additional charges. So he's like, oh my phone didn't work. But that's the type of people we're dealing with. But let me point out that also at this time Brandon Sarno starts grooming the victim. He starts figuring out, huh, this year was vulnerable. I'm right here in this community. Let me start grooming her. On March the 20th, Randy Colfield tells the victim that another male is gonna be coming to her house. Randy Colfield tells the victim exactly where to go, how to perform these sexual acts. The 29 year old John Cahinde picks her up at the house. They go to the days in in Port Ritchie. They perform the sexual acts and videotape it and then send it to Randy Colfield. Then afterwards, and then he uploads it to adult friend finder again. And John Cahinde then takes the victim to the store to get vape. Randy Colfield kept demanding more of the victim. And at this point, the victim's kind of like, whoa, what's going on? Are you uploading these videos? Are you doing this? And he's like, no, no, I'm not doing that. And so she kind of breaks it off where she stops communicating with them. Randy Colfield then emails her. He starts sending explicit pictures of adult males. He then asks her, you know, do you still love me? What's going on? Do you still want to make these videos? And she kind of hangs up and she starts engaging that person. So I go back to the beginning of the story. In April of 2023, when deputies picked her up, she was actually, what she was going when she ran away from school was that she was trying to find Brandon Sarno, who I go back to was the second suspect in this case that FDLE had arrested back in 2013 who was back down the streets, being a predator, trying to manipulate these young girls and who would have known what this guy would have done had, you know, deputies, patrol deputies, not picked her up and not rescued her from that situation. So I know I'm trying to go through this as a big case, but what I'm saying, I go back to it, what our detectives had to see on those videos, what the, you know, Rita Peters had to go through. I can never explain it. I will never want to explain it. I will never want to talk about it, but it's horrific. Randy Colfield on his phone, they're just still going through the investigation through search warrants. I mean, we did everything we were supposed to do legally. We went through search warrants, got everything had to do. You find videos of two to six year old kids, over hundreds of them, they're saying, they're still going through and they can't find hundreds of them, but you're seeing, you know, male, female, bestiality. You're seeing things that nobody should ever have to see. This Randy Colfield, I know, one thing he said was that he's scared to death to go into prison. Randy Colfield, you should be scared to God, scared to death to have to see God. God's going to be the ultimate decider upon you for what you've done to all these people. As I go back to, this is still an ongoing case. There's a couple of things I want to explain and talk about and the fact of what we need out there from the community. One is we need anybody else who's been a victim, anybody realize you're the victim. It's not your fault. Please have the courage to come forward. Please come forward, help out, because as bad as you feel, there's somebody else who feels horrible too and maybe you are the one that rescues them. The other one too is with human trafficking, you know, everybody thinks, oh, this happens in the streets, it happens in, you know, restaurants or massage parlors. It's happening online now. So be aware of that. For parents, recognize this young girl, she had her iPad taken away from her, she had her phone taken away from her, but what wasn't taken away was the TV. So she was using a television app to go on there and communicate with Randy Colfelt. We had to find a way to civilly go after these websites. If they're not going to protect our kids, we need to go after them. They have a civil responsibility to protect children. If they know what's going on, the content going on there, we have to go after them. And then the other one is we can never live in a society where pedophilia is normal. I say that deep in sincerity, we cannot live in a society where pedophilia is normal. These young kids have no idea what's going on. They're being manipulated. And you know, for those two to six-year-olds that are on that site, this is horrible. We cannot normalize this. And with that being said, before I bring the general up, I just ask again, everybody pray. I ask God Almighty to look upon. Nobody has to go through this hell that these kids are living with. So I just pray that we can find these kids, we can rescue these kids, and the victim advocates can take them out of the hell they're in. So with that being said, General Moody, appreciate it. Thank you, Sheriff. And the Pasco County Sheriff's Office got a lot of praise for me before we came out here. But I just want to say to this community, the Tampa Bay community, Pasco County is really doing some things right. They have not only their detectives and their deputies that are educated and trained in human trafficking, but they give and support their victim advocates. And the victim advocates in many of these cases are the reason a case succeeds or fails, the reason we can put a horrific individual who is only going to harm people in our community behind bars or we don't. And so in this case specifically, the victim advocate who worked with the victim made sure that she knew she could trust law enforcement and trust the advocate, helped her recall information, helped her identify offenders, extraordinarily important. And so I commend her and I know that Pasco County is very proud of her actions. This is an incredibly devastating tragic case. It's some of the worst activity that I have seen in human trafficking. And we often talk about human trafficking and what sets it apart from other types of sex crimes. It's when coercion of some sort is used to force a person. It doesn't have to be a child. And many of our cases in which we rescue people, they're not children, but they force individuals into sexual or labor activities against their will. In this case, a man had significant control of a child by using his purported affection and love. And the threat of taking that away or shifting that to another victim terrified this young girl. And so she would do whatever he asked her to with whomever. And that is what these men and women standing behind me did, they uncovered that. And we know that he had already threatened this young victim with finding someone else. So this young victim who bravely came forward and worked with law enforcement officers, no doubt, has saved other young girls from going through this same hell. As a mother of a young child who is often online, this hits us all to our core. Especially if right now you have young children at home. You can't go, you can't help but go there and start imagining this happening in your own family. But indeed, all of these young children in Florida need protection and they all need people to care about them. And that's what's great about this department and what they've done today. I'm also incredibly proud that this case which spanned beyond jurisdictional boundaries, beyond age limits, we were able to bring in partners that have been highly trained and are set up to immediately go after these folks in other counties. FDLE, thank you so much for your efforts. Clay County who is here today with us provided tremendous assistance and a search warrant and an arrest in their county. And we were able to quickly identify other offenders and arrest them and take them off the streets. This is a great example of how within Florida we have been able to identify this crime, how it is infiltrating throughout our different jurisdictions and assemble a team that can be effective and efficient, strike quickly and bringing perpetrators to justice. So this is a great example and I'm so proud of this team and I'm glad you are here to help us inform the community of their efforts. I'm also proud of my statewide prosecutors. Since taking office, they knew how much this crime and atrocity meant to me. They have been diligent in their efforts. They have a near perfect conviction rate. I believe they've put about 100 traffickers behind bars in that short amount of time. Thank you so much. I probably don't say that enough, but it means so much to me, not just as the attorney general, but as a fifth generation Floridian and a mom who cares about the state and wants to do right by our children. Thank you so much. You should really never talk about family. It gets you. Eradicating this crime from Florida is one of my top priorities. We will keep working on this. We will fill the gaps. We will make sure that we have trained, not just trained and well resourced groups to eradicate this crime, but the right individuals with the right passion and perspective and diligence and immediacy behind their actions. Because as I tell them, and they would tell you, if we can't act quickly, that's another victim that has to endure this for longer. And we will not have that in Florida. I want to also say in Florida, we've done some things uniquely as it relates to human trafficking. When it came to our attention that we may not be getting all of the information to law enforcement quickly from the National Human Trafficking Hotline, we developed our own hotline. We now have people in place for Floridians to call if they suspect trafficking or if they themselves have been trafficked. It's 1-855-FLA-SAFE. 1-855-FLA-SAFE. You can call that at any time. If you suspect trafficking and we will bring our team and engage our highly trained team. And what can the community do? Not only can you report it if you suspect it to the hotline, you can go to youcanstopht.com. Youcanstopht.com. My office has recently released an online toolkit for parents and guardians. We're about to intern to summer. I know this all too well. There is a lot of free time on our children's hands. And why is that dangerous? Because online predators await. That is what happened in this case. It began on a chat room, but I can tell you we have had successful prosecutions that started on gaming apps. So whether it's a chat room, a gaming app, a more popular social media app, this is how offenders are connecting with our victims, our children. Parents, guardians, you have to be engaged. You have to stay on top of it. And if you don't know where to stop, go to youcanstopht.com and use our online safety toolkit. We're gonna be releasing in the next few weeks some other tips for parents and guardians and dealing with what the summer and the time off and the idle time can bring those challenges to families. Again, I think the Clay County Sheriff's Office, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office, they have been dogged in this case. It is truly impressive. And FDLE, who I know will continue to be a leader and continue to bring to bear the full weight and might and determination of this state to make Florida a zero-tolerant state. Thank you again for being here. Thank you, General. I wanna express my profound appreciation for the work of our agents and analysts that did on this case and our ongoing partnership with the Pasco Sheriff's Office and the leadership of Attorney General Moody and her office of statewide prosecution, Rita Peters, she's a rock star. Thank you, Rita. This case involves a cross-section of the worst crimes we see as the Sheriff spoke about, human trafficking, sex crimes and prank on Florida's youth. I hope this case serves as a warning to would-be criminals that if you try to exploit our children or think you can manipulate and victimize our citizens and get away with it, I promise you it won't end well. Together with partners across the state, like the ones who are sitting alongside me here today, we will continue to identify and target you. The arrest that we announced today were only possible because of the courage of this young victim to come forward and tell the painful truth and the diligence of these victim advocates. This serves as a sign of hope for victims of human trafficking and sexual abuse. You are not alone and help is available. Already this case stretches halfway across the state from Pasco to Clay County. And with the digital nature of Colfelt's grooming, there's no telling how wide of a span geographically his crimes could have extended. It's important to know that we have not completed this case and we are seeking the public's help to ensure other victims receive justice and other criminals face the consequences of their actions. As investigators continue to pour through digital evidence, improve for more potential victims or accomplices, anyone with information related to this case we please, as a general reference to the phone number, please contact 1-855-FLA-SAFE to help us put this guy away for a very long, long time. Thank you very much. Thank you to Clay County as well for your assistance last week. Thank you. Any questions? Sheriff, just to clarify, did Colfelt ever meet this victim in person or everything he did was? Yeah, everything was online. Everything through social media, through those sites. That's how he interacted, that's how he found her, that's how he interacted with her and that's how, and then through phone calls, he would then, so when she was meeting up with these three suspects, she would, you know, he would call her, say, hey, this is what's gonna happen. He would even tell her, this is what I want you to wear, this is what I want you to do, this is what's gonna happen. And sometimes while they're at those locations, he was still in contact with them. So that's how it was all done through that way. Were these men paying him for this? So that's part of the investigation, which we're finding out now, but it appears that everything was done like, hey, you do this video for me? I then, you know, these three suspects were sending the videos as they would send the videos and he was putting them online to make money. So that's how everything, the transactions were all moving that way. That's like, I go back to it. Technology is moving so quickly that, you know, I get in the past to be, oh, here's X amount of dollars or a credit or whatever it is. But now it's, hey, you do this, I'll give you this, but now I'm gonna pay you through this video. And now with this video, it's gonna go online. And then, you know, these sites, and as I go back to these sites, need to monitor, they need to be held responsible for them because these people are making a lot of money, putting criminal videos on their sites. How is these girls doing right now? You know, the victim advocate, you wanna, Kim, you wanna speak about that? I'm sorry, what was the question? How is she doing right now? I hear we're going to support her. She's doing better. She's in her healing phase right now. It's gonna be a long journey for her, but we are diligent to walk alongside her to ensure that she does reach her full potential in life and to continue to wrap her with wraparound care services. Sure, when she ran our left school, and you said she was going to meet a man, which one of these guys was that she was going to meet? So it was Brandon, the one who had been in recipe four back in 2013 by FDLE, because from the time when he met her, they, the drugs had sexual intercourse or sexual encounter in the woods. At that point, we believe he started grooming her and he was trying to take her away from Randy. Did these men know each other? Rather than connection to each other? The only thing we're finding out right now, that we were, I don't know if you guys wanna can follow up on this. The only thing is, basically he had taken those pictures of her. He posts them online. As he posts them online, he's out there searching for other pedophiles like him and other predators like him. Hey, who's interested? And then that's how they made the connection that way. So who wants to touch on that? So they didn't know each other at all. That he would reach out to them through the adult friend finder website. He would speak with them and ultimately a lot of them would use a downloaded app to try to match their phone number. They did speak back and forth via text and a little bit on the phone. However, they were never introduced. They didn't know each other as far as their true identity. As far as I know, they don't even know who each other are. I mean, they may not have it. And did any of them make any statements after they were arrested as to how in the world they ever got to the place that they're at in terms of these really odd desires? Only Co-Felt. Co-Felt claims to be a porn addicted individual and it ended up starting as a fantasy and he just went down the rabbit hole according to him. And that's what he's holding true to. What led to her finally telling law enforcement about all this? This young lady right here. Ultimately, she built up a relationship where there was starting to talk and then with these cases, she will bring us in when they're ready. We get introduced by the time the victim meets us, they already know, hey, we're gonna, this is my friend. That's how she introduces her. And then there's a lot that goes into it to get them to start to open up to us. It's a tiered relationship. So once they have built that trust with them, they'll reach out to us, fill us in on kind of a background of the victim so we're not coming in there blind. And then even then it takes hours. And then once the trust is built and even three, four months later, we're just now getting to where the victim will reach out to me directly. So it's, without the victim advocate, you can't do these investigations at all. And there's a fear that there could be many other teenage girls like this. Yes, sir. That have a company. You said you're looking for more victims of co-pelt. Was he using his real name and photo? He was. You mentioned that rabbit hole that, I guess he went down. I'm wondering, do other, some people who are considered pedophiles know they're a pedophile? Or are they going, you know what I mean, do they admit it to you? Or they just said this went down a rabbit hole and justified it. No, sir, they're not gonna admit that. That was a child, right? You know, they know what they are, but they have excuses for everything. But he knew that was a child. So the victim, she contacted the services that were provided or how did that happen? I believe you were already involved. I believe she was already involved with her previously. And that's just, they had a relationship and she was just working with her through Dip Fair's avenues to help her heal. All right, well thank you so much. Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys being here. Thank you.