Suburban family who threatened West African teens into forced labor sentenced

Three members of a south suburban family accused of threatening two undocumented West African teenagers into forced labor have been sentenced after being found guilty on child labor trafficking charges, according to the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago.

Throughout the teens' ordeal, defendants "were calculated, manipulative, intentional and abusive,” prosecutors wrote in sentencing documents. “Due to the defendants’ conduct, [the victims] lost their innocence and their childhoods.”

Sentenced on Friday were:

• Nawomi Awoga, 75, Hazel Crest, sentenced to eight and a half years.

• Marina Oke, 38, sentenced to seven years, 10 months.

• Assiba Lea Fandohan, 35, sentenced to six years, eight months.

In addition, they must pay a total of $153,000 in restitution.

All three were found guilty in January after a two-week trial, according to court documents.

“I’m proud to say that justice was finally served in this child labor trafficking case that has spanned nearly a decade,” said Mark Woods-Hawkins, a special agent with the U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Security Service, in a statement.

Awoga, along with her two daughters, Oke and Fandohan, obtained tourism visas for two teens from the African country Benin, where Awoga is a citizen, according to court documents.

Fake identities were crafted for both, and Oke would scream at and hit the children if they didn’t study those false identities. The defendants also instructed the teens to lie to customs agents and say they were sisters.

When the teens traveled to the United States in 2014, however, border agents never asked them about any details of their papers or identification, according to court documents.

The teenage girls, then ages 11 and 13, were kept at the defendants’ homes in Country Club Hills and Hazel Crest and forced to do housework such as childcare, cleaning, cooking and hand-washing laundry, according to court documents.

Investigators estimated about 120 hours of work was being done by the two teens every week, and if they didn’t wake up on time or complete that work, they were beaten by Oke.

They also were denied healthcare and schooling.

Awoga once drew blood from one girl by biting her after the teen was accused of leaving the laundry in a bowl too long, according to court documents. The teens' time outside was limited so as to not raise suspicions of the neighbors or passersby.

Eventually Oke began to teach one of the children how to braid hair and brought the teen to work at a salon in addition to the housework and childcare duties they already were performing, according to court documents.

In September 2016, the older teen ran away after hearing Oke say she was going to pour boiling water and hot peppers in her eyes. The teen caught a cab to the Loop where a man helped her call police, according to court documents.

Nearly a year later, in August 2017, law enforcement interviewed Oke at her home and the remaining teen was hidden before being sent to Wisconsin, Iowa and eventually back to Illinois over the next several months. She ran from the home where she was staying in September 2018, and called police from a gas station.

The teens had limited contact with their families during their time in the U.S., and the younger teen’s father died while she was being held, prosecutors said.