Days of searching had led the fearful parents here: a Thunder Bay bus station.

Waiting desperately for a glimpse of their 16-year-old son.

A car pulled up and there was the boy, but they waited, wary of spooking the people who brought him there.

“I waited until he was almost at the door, then I went and grabbed him,” the father said.

He hadn’t showered in days, but he was healthy.

They later learned their son had been rotated through different drug houses over the course of a week, one of three boys who had been recruited in Toronto and transported to Thunder Bay, trafficked for their labour and unable to leave.

As northern Ontario communities contend with a tainted illicit drug supply that has fuelled a raging opioid crisis and record overdose deaths in communities such as Thunder Bay, police and public health officials point to the prevalence of suspects from the GTA, some of them young people, in over their heads, seduced by the lucrative drug trade, who are taken away from their homes and manipulated by organized criminals.

While human trafficking is normally viewed as connected to the sex trade, police are encountering labour trafficking for the purposes of the drug trade, carried out by criminal groups that insulate themselves from police probes by using young people to conduct street-level dealings.

Police data shows that, on average, about 59 per cent of all people arrested for drug-related offences in Thunder Bay originated from addresses outside that jurisdiction, with more than half of the outsiders charged hailing from GTA jurisdictions like Toronto, Peel and Durham.

Of the roughly 137 outsiders arrested yearly for drug offences, on average over a five-year window, police are finding that more than half of them have GTA addresses. 

Thunder Bay police Deputy Chief Jeremy Pearson said people from southern Ontario jurisdictions are playing a major role in the city’s illicit drug trade, with “the majority of those individuals harking from the Greater Toronto Area.” 

Pearson said the basis for a drug dealer making the 1,400-kilometre journey north to the city of 111,000 people located on Lake Superior, is “just the sheer profitability.”

Over the past five years, cocaine, crack cocaine and fentanyl were the top three drugs seized by Pearson’s team, but health-care officials tell the Star there are numerous drugs at play including opioids like OxyContin.

A father, who spoke to the Star on the condition his name not be published due to concerns about his family’s safety, told of how he took extreme steps to locate his son, 16, after the boy snuck out of their Ajax home in the early morning hours of April 2022.

The high school student left only a terse note that led his parents to believe he was going through something, needed a break and had decided to visit a friend in downtown Toronto.

The family contacted Durham police to inform them that their son had left a concerning note before leaving home.

At first, the boy maintained phone contact with his mother, but those messages soon became sparse, until he was unreachable, his father said.

Durham police told the family that one of their son’s teenage friends had been charged with drug offences in Thunder Bay. Police were also able to trace his son’s phone to the Thunder Bay area, the father said. 

That’s when the parents decided, against police advice, to take matters into their own hands.

On Good Friday, four days after their son left home, the anxious parents left Ajax for Thunder Bay.

They arrived late that night and immediately met police to notify them that they were in town searching for their son.

The couple checked into a hotel and started their search the following morning. They printed hundreds of missing posters with his picture and their contact information.

“I plastered the (posters) all over,” the father said.

They were able to gather information that led them to several addresses: a shopping centre and a low-rise apartment building where his son’s friend had been arrested earlier that week.

Many of the people he spoke to — admitted drug users — showed concern for his boy’s well-being, he said. Some offered helpful information.

“They know these are people’s kids serving them drugs,” he said.

He connected with a woman at a local apartment building who knew the people his son was with and agreed to send messages to them, to advise them that the young man’s father was in Thunder Bay, searching for him.

“She ended up calling these guys,” he said. “We were trying to negotiate my son’s release. This went back and forth for hours. But they wouldn’t drop him off.”

But he was determined, even after numerous calls and text messages proved futile.

“I’m not leaving until I get my son back,” he told himself.

The big breakthrough came after he enlisted the help of high-profile Toronto social media account, Keep6ixsolid, which posted a note to Instagram about his son.

Almost instantly, tips started flooding in, he said. Someone contacted them, via Snapchat, to let them know that “he’s coming home (to the GTA) tonight and he’s taking the bus.”

The anxious parents went to the local bus terminal, where they kept watch to see if he would show up.

“The emotions really came in when I seen him at the bus stop,” the father said. “That was the moment where it was like man, he’s back and we’re lucky to have him back.”

After he was picked up by his parents, the boy told his father that “it’s all over the internet and those guys sent me home.”   

Durham police confirmed that a missing-person report was filed in relation to the Ajax youth, but declined to provide further details.

Thunder Bay police told the Star their officers were involved in a missing persons investigation for the youth and were in close contact with the youth’s family. They also confirmed the account of the youth being found by his father at the bus terminal.

Though the identities of the people who recruited his son to sell drugs remain unclear, the bits of detail the father did gather led him to believe that his son was first approached with the opportunity to sell cellphones.

He said people in the drug network communicated with his son via Snapchat, where messages can be made to disappear after being read.

After building some rapport, he was presented with the prospect of making more money in Thunder Bay.

The father later learned that his son and two other boys met up at Yorkdale Shopping Centre and they were taken to Thunder Bay in a minivan.

Once there, they made him remove his SIM card from his phone, so his family couldn’t contact him, as he was rotated through different drug houses. 

“These are older guys that are recruiting these kids,” the father said.

“They tell them, ‘If you get caught, you’re only 16, you’re not going to get any major time, and we’ll take care of you,’” he continued.

While he wouldn’t recommend any parent take the risk he did to find his son, he’s glad he acted quickly. 

“100 per cent, I would’ve ended up getting a call from the police and he would have been arrested.”

Of particular concern is the young age of some of the offenders making the trek north, Pearson said. The average age of a non-resident youth engaging in drug criminality in Thunder Bay is 16, and last year police fielded five separate reports of youth missing from southern Ontario, who were believed to be in Thunder Bay for the purpose of drug trafficking, he added.

“It absolutely is a crisis,” Pearson said.

The squalid drug dens where young people are being found by police “are not a place where you want to see a 15- or 16-year-old,” he said. “Think about the dangers inherent in young people with, you know, minds that are not yet fully mature, exposed to drugs, money and firearms.”

In many cases, it’s challenging for police to delineate between suspects and victims as it is not always apparent when a young person is being exploited or coerced, Pearson said.

“We have to bear in mind, when we’re dealing with a young person, there is a chance that this is a person who has been trafficked,” Pearson said.

Pearson said, on occasion, his officers have been able to locate these youth and then work with child and family agencies to co-ordinate their return home.

Pearson said it’s not surprising that more youth in this situation don’t speak out or seek help because “there’s the very real fear and intimidation that goes along with just the nature of human trafficking.”

The fact that they have vulnerabilities, and may have been exploited, is a potentially mitigating factor for the courts to consider and that becomes part of the judicial process, he said.

He said youth in Thunder Bay are also being recruited into the drug trade.

In 2023, police identified members or associates of as many as 20 criminal groups from Southern Ontario in Thunder Bay.

“There have been cases where we believe that possibly disputes in the GTA have spilled over into the city of Thunder Bay,” he said.

Police have also observed  a “very unusual dynamic,” where groups that wouldn’t normally “tolerate one another’s presence, are working in proximity, because there’s enough work for everyone.”

Mary Birdsell, a Toronto lawyer and the executive director of Justice for Children and Youth, told the Star that Thunder Bay is one of the communities outside the GTA where youth clients of her legal clinic, predominantly teenage boys, have been found after leaving home unannounced.

“We’ve had a number of young boys who essentially, from their parents’ point of view and sometimes from our point of view, they’re kind of missing,” Birdsell said.

In some cases, their mysterious disappearance is being reported to the clinic by their parents, who are often unaware of their whereabouts, but on other occasions it’s the police from a jurisdiction north of the GTA calling to say that they’re in custody, Birdsell said.

“Our impression is that these young men are being taken sometimes against their will,” she said, adding that sometimes these boys end up in circumstances where the people who take them “are looking to use them in exploitative ways.”

For young girls, trafficking often involves the sex trade; for boys, it’s more typically drugs, she said.

There are a host of complicated reasons why youth end up in these situations and find it difficult to get out, Birdsell added, noting it can be especially complicated for racialized and marginalized youth  “because we police them instead of caring for them.”

She notes that racialized, Black and Indigenous youth are at higher risk of being victims of this type of predatory targeting by criminals.

The story of Khalid Mohamed, then 25, a Toronto man who was found not guilty of second-degree murder in March, offers a glimpse into the highly profitable business of transporting drugs from the GTA to Thunder Bay, the inherent dangers of the lifestyle and how drug transactions play out.

In his first three- or four-day trip to Thunder Bay, in September 2021, Mohamed made a little under $50,000 from an investment of about $7,000 in drugs, which he described as an “amazing” return, court files show. He described the drug demand in Thunder Bay as  “ridiculous” and “extreme.” 

Mohamed decided to establish a “safe house,” a place where he could sleep and keep his drugs and cash, and a separate location for a “trap house,” the street name for the space where drug sales typically happen, the March 31 Superior Court ruling shows.

Things went so well that he returned to Thunder Bay a few weeks later on Oct. 15, 2021, and brought more drugs — nine ounces of cocaine, three ounces of fentanyl, and 100 OxyContin pills — in the hope of a generous return on his investment, the ruling shows.

To evade detection Mohamed travelled by bus from Toronto and dressed in a dishevelled way to blend in, and only kept a small quantity of drugs (an ounce) and cash (less than $5,000) on him at the trap house — to minimize loses, if he was robbed, and in case of a police raid. Mohamed depended on a runner to resupply him with drugs kept at the safe house. The runner would bring more drugs and then return the cash to the safe house.

Mohamed testified that Steven Burns visited his trap house with two other men on Oct. 17, 2021, hoping to conduct a drug deal. Mohamed said he was told that Burns was known “for robbing traps.”

Mohamed testified that later that night, Burns and the two other men turned up to his trap house unannounced, armed with knives. Mohamed testified to being attacked by the three men who ended up taking fentanyl, about $5,000 in cash, a watch and thousands of dollars in jewelry.

Mohamed gave chase and caught up to Burns. Following an altercation Burns collapsed on the pavement in the vicinity of a nearby casino. Mohamed was arrested at the scene.

Mohamed told the court that during the tussle he realized that Burns was reaching for a knife. Both men struggled for possession of the knife and Burns was stabbed in the melee, he testified.

“I did not intend to kill him,” Mohamed testified. 

The court agreed, saying “Mohamed stabbed Burns twice for the purpose of defending himself.”

The influx of drugs has led to an escalation of the opioid crisis, Pearson said, adding that “the vast majority of overdoses, toxicological deaths, are related to opioids, and fentanyl specifically.”

Kandace Belanger, manager of street outreach and harm reduction for the health unit, said that in recent years her community has been grappling with an overdose mortality rate around two to three times the provincial average.

“We know that the substances that are coming into Thunder Bay are toxic, that they’re tainted, and that we really can’t trust that they are what people think that they are,” Belanger said.

In many cases, drug users can experience an overdose triggered by a substance laced with multi-drugs, which complicates the response and efforts to reverse the effects with things like Naloxone.

Harm-reduction services took a hit in March, when the only supervised drug consumption and drug testing site serving the entire region was closed, a casualty of Ontario’s new plan to close supervised drug consumption sites located within 200 metres of schools and child care centres. 

Belanger bemoans the fact that drug traffickers from southern Ontario have been major contributors to the opioid crisis in her city.

“It’s very sad, because, obviously, there is a concern with addiction and substances here that is so much so that people are coming from other areas in the province to kind of prey upon them,” she said. “Essentially, profiting off of trauma.”

Meanwhile the Ajax father believes it will require a collective community, government and police effort to target and stamp out criminal groups who target vulnerable youth from Black and other racialized backgrounds.

“We know this is a big problem, so what are we going to do about it as a community?”