Timothy Ballard - Slave Stealers: True Accounts of Slave Rescues: Then and Now

2018 Rockwell Group Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(CIP on file)

ISBN 978-1-62972-484-3

Printed in the United States of America

Publishers Printing, Salt Lake City, UT

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

COVER DESIGN CREDITS

Book design Shadow Mountain

Cover illustration: irasophiass/Shutterstock.com

Author photo courtesy of the author

Art direction: Richard Erickson

Design: Sheryl Dickert Smith

Production design: Kayla Hackett

To my best friend, Katherine,
and to our children

Tim Ballard and Mike Tomlin

I was raised in urban Virginia in a black community. I didnt particularly trust white people. So when I was told one day by my high school administrators to get in a police car driven by a white cop, you can imagine what expletives went running through my mind.

The car ride wasnt what you might be thinking. (Thank goodness!) I had actually been selected to attend a leadership program outside of Philadelphia at the Freedoms Foundation at Valley Forge. (I would later learn, incidentally, that Tim Ballard, the author of this book, had attended this same program as a youth. In light of how our paths would cross later, perhaps this was more providential than coincidental.) The cop, Officer Steve Rutherford, had for some reason volunteered to drive me and another classmate who had been selected up to Valley Forge to attend the program. Being one of two black kids sitting in the back of a police car driven through two states by a white cop was, though totally innocent and benign, extremely uncomfortable, to say the least. As you might guess, the car ride up could pretty much be described as dead silent. Beyond the occasional awkward glance I threw toward the officerwondering who he really was and what he was really planning on doing with meI dared not hazard any other form of communication with him.

But then something happened. He spoke. And he spoke kind words. I replied politely. A simple conversation ensued. I cant even remember what we said, but I remember what I felt, because it was the last thing I expected to feel. Friendship.

After the conference ended, Officer Rutherford was waiting in the parking lot to drive us home. The ride home was much different. We talked the whole way. We joked, we laughed. All of a sudden, our relationship had nothing at all to do with how either of us looked or what professions we had chosen. We were just two human beings, both in the same image of God, interested in the same things, laughing at the same jokes, dealing with some of the same life problems, and just being friends.

As my high school years passed, I stayed in touch with Officer Rutherford. I grew to like him more and more. I eventually graduated and left home to attend the College of William and Mary, where I had been blessed to win a football scholarship. Moving to a different city and playing football on a team made up of young men from around the country of every color and creed opened my eyes and softened my heart in important ways. I began to realize that there were actually a lot of people like Officer Rutherford. I didnt have to automatically distrust and hate people anymore based on a false prejudice.

One day at college, I received a phone call from home. It was one of the worst phone calls of my entire life.

Officer Rutherford is dead. Those are the only words I remember from that call.

I dropped the phone. I couldnt believe it. I couldnt process it. My heart hurt in ways I didnt think possible, especially after I heard what had happened. As it turned out, Officer Rutherford had volunteered to participate in a police investigation of the strangest kind. A few thugs from my hometown had been ordering pizzas delivered to certain locales, then robbing the pizza man clean when he showed up. Officer Rutherford agreed to go undercover as pizza delivery boy one night, and, as fate would have it, he ended up delivering pizza to the thieves. When they made their move, he dropped to the ground as if submitting to their demands. But one of them noticed that he was carrying a gun, panicked, and shot him, killing him almost instantly.

Officer Rutherford was a good man. He had a job. It was a tough job, but he did it to serve others. And he lost his life over it, leaving behind a grieving wife. My broken heart broke even harder when I learned that the thugs in this case who took his life over pizza money were a couple of old high school classmates of mine.

After this incident, I was determined to be better, to look deeper, and to search for the truth in humanity and society that too often gets hidden by prejudice. Finding that truth can be very difficult. There are deep-seated issues driven by racesome real, some perceivedthat stand as stumbling blocks to a more peaceful America. But its a peaceful America that I want to see someday, one that I believe we can see someday. Like I said, though, its tough to find it through the hate and divisiveness that plague our society. Its tough to find even for people like me, who are desperately searching for it; its impossible to find for people who refuse to even try.

As an NFL coach, I get a front-and-center view of this sort of disunity. Certainly the world has seen how the NFL sometimes serves as a sort of microcosm of the nation as a whole. And I dont think Ive ever seen the NFL as pained and plagued by divisiveness as it is right now.

For years I have been praying and pondering for a solution to this ever-growing problem. Then, not long ago, I stumbled on one: a highly unexpected one. Its a solution connected to the book you are about to read. Its connected to the deep friendship that my fellow Pittsburgh Steelers and I have forged with Tim Ballard and the brave men and women at Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.)a nonprofit organization made up of former Navy SEALs, CIA operators, and Homeland Security agents who dedicate their lives to infiltrating the black markets of child sex slavery in order to liberate these innocent captives and lock up their predators. After serving in the CIA, then later as a special agent and undercover operator for the Department of Homeland Security, where he worked mostly on cases involving sex crimes against children, Tim founded O.U.R. as a means to attack this vicious plague from a different angle.

But before I can fully explain how O.U.R. helped me find the unique solution I was pondering in connection to the national hate and disunity we are all witnessing, I need to first tell you about the circumstances under which I met Tim and O.U.R.for it was my process of discovering them that helped me see the light I was looking for.

It began with a chance encounter with former Navy SEAL Dave Lopez, who owned a tactical training company. I had tracked Dave down with the thought of hiring him to provide some tactical security training for certain players on my team. Dave would later tell me that, while he had come to Pittsburgh that day excited about the prospect of negotiating a business deal, as he walked into my office, something told him to stop. He just knew. He wasnt to even bring up the training opportunity. Instead, he was to introduce me to an organization that he worked foran organization called Operation Underground Railroad.