Human trafficking is the third most lucrative illegal industry behind the selling of guns and drugs. An Omaha mother whose runaway teeange daughter was recruited for prostitution shares her story with Channel 6 News.

Lauree B. will tell you that her now 16-year-old daughter has been difficult to love. "I tried talking to her. I tried to get her to sit down and watch movies, play games. She just wanted to run, run, run, run, run, run.”

A year-and-a-half ago, Lauree's daughter ran one final time. Though no one knows how he found her, for 37-year-old Leonard Russell of Iowa, Lauree's runaway daughter was the perfect prey.

"Things just go through your head,” says Lauree. “What is she doing? Is she alive? Is she dead somewhere? It's hard. It's very hard."

Over that year-and-a-half, Russell sold Lauree's daughter and a 15-year-old girl to men for sex all over the country. Russell trafficked and prostituted the two young girls for money.

"It's hard. It's hard as a mother knowing that my 15-year-old daughter went through this."

Then one morning earlier this year, Lauree got the phone call she'd been waiting for. Police found her daughter on a bus in Washington D.C.

"She was scared at first. She didn't want to come to me or say anything because she knows how I am. She knew I would want to go kill him."

Though finding her daughter closed one painful chapter in this mother's life, it wasn't over. In September, Lauree's daughter had to relive the experiences by testifying against Russell in the Crawford County, Iowa trial. A jury convicted him for human trafficking. Russell was sentenced last Monday to 25 years in prison.

It was a bittersweet ending to a terrible ordeal. A conviction won't give Lauree's daughter that year-and-a-half of her life back. Time has changed her forever.

Russell was the first man convicted under Iowa's new Human Trafficking Law.

Just three days before Russell was sentenced, an Omaha man was indicted for the exact same crime. The U.S. attorney says 28-year-old Amar Henderson also was trafficking young women.