Trafficked or Trafficker? Childhood sex abuse, drugs, sex work, pregnancy and now, staying clean

Court Tuesday could decide the future of Harley Cooley and her unborn son.

WARNING: explicit material included, but no profanity.

FORT WAYNE, Ind. —Her mother was asleep on the couch just a few feet away when her stepdad put his hands down her pants and molested her.

She was eight years old.

Scared, she finally pulled away and ran to the bathroom, but it got even creepier.

Beth Cooley and her daughter, Harley, are now clean and hope for a much better future.

When she opened the door, her stepdad was standing there, waiting for her.

The monster in the dark, so to speak, put his arms around her and whispered into her ear.

“I’m sorry. I thought you would like it it,” he said. 

Sean Hassenplug is on the sex offender registry for life. (Allen County Sheriff's Department)

“I ran upstairs and I remember my ear, like for days afterwards, like physically burned for days,” the victim said.

That wasn’t the last time her abuser would touch, fondle and manipulate her sexual organs, but when she walked in on her tormentor performing a sex act on her younger sister, it deepened the trauma.

As he was sexually abusing her sister, his own daughter was sitting nearby playing on a LEAP Pad.

“As an older sister, I felt like I kind of failed my little sister,” she said, as if an 8-year old would have the power to stop it.

Video was edited to remove some names. Listen to Harley Cooley describe her experience as a fentanyl addict and briefly, a sex worker in a violent situation. She is now clean and expecting a child in 2.5 months. She also describes her childhood sexual abuse and how it affected her.

Then came another shock.

“I went up to her and I was like, ‘hey, I saw what happened’ and she was like, ‘it’s okay, my dad does it too’. I didn’t know any of this.”

Later, when the case against her stepdad was going through the Allen County courts, the younger sister’s biological father “got picked up on 10 counts of child molestation,” including his own children, confirming her sister’s story.

When the stepdad, in that home for less than a year, realized he was about to be found out, he fled, this time for another mother with young girls in a neighboring state, the victim said. 

Child molesting is one of the worst of sins against the young.

Young girls turn into young maidens who harbor shame and disgust over sexual molestation and rape.

They may become withdrawn or angry or given to cutting, a type of self mutilation. To keep those humiliating and horrible thoughts from replaying in their minds again and again, they often turn to booze or drugs, but that rarely works.

After the victim’s mother, Beth Cooley, found out about the abuse during her daughter’s preteen meltdown, she had her own breakdown.

She had no idea of the sexual abuse manifesting itself in misbehavior until that day when Harley Cooley was 12, she blurted out the truth.

“I dropped to my knees and bawled.” The man who became her daughters’ stepdad had seemed so perfect and so loving, but her own mother never trusted him, she said. He was too perfect

Beth sat both girls down at the kitchen table with a piece of paper and a pencil and asked them to write down what happened.

Then she contacted the Fort Wayne Police Department.

Sean Hassenplug, now 43, pleaded guilty in July 2019 to felony charges of child molesting and performing sexual conduct in the presence of a child, but there were numerous original charges filed in December 2017.

Those felony charges stemming from the abuse of Harley, now 22, and her sister and Hassenplug’s own daughter between 2012 and 2014 were as follows: 

-three counts of child molesting - intercourse or deviate sex with a victim less than 14 years old; 

-three counts of child molesting; 

-child molesting - fondling or touching a child under 14; 

-performing sexual conduct in the presence of a minor; and, 

-dissemination of matter harmful to minors.

Allen Superior Court Judge David Zent sentenced Hassenplug to 16.5 years of prison, two eight-year sentences and a third for  2.5 years, all to be served consecutively with two years suspended.

To the family’s shock, he was released in February 2025 to Allen County Community Corrections, living out at the Residential Services Center and holding down a couple of jobs.

He’d served less than five years in prison.

The scars of child molesting never go away. By middle school, Harley was “smoking” and she didn’t mean cigarettes, she meant marijuana.

“Honestly, the way I dealt with it after the case was I started smoking a lot and then it turned into becoming an addict using fentanyl,” Harley said in a recent interview, sitting beside her mother.

“I mean, you’re tired, you go to sleep. When you’re sleeping you don’t got to deal with it. You don’t got to deal with the pain, the thoughts, the PTSD, the sitting there at night, randomly thinking about it for hours at a time and then thinking about how it felt like, just like I could have done more, especially for my sister and the little girls and his younger daughter.”

In October 2023, when she was 19 years old, Harley Cooley, ran into a high school classmate.

By this time, Harley was working at a fast food restaurant and actively addicted to fentanyl. 

“I was using a lot of fentanyl at the time. My mental health was really bad, messed up,” a lot of it having to with what she experienced as a child. 

Her mother, who works but suffers from severe health conditions, was also a user along with her stepdad.

The former classmate, Leticia Granados, who has her own story to tell, wanted to “hang out.” Then came the solicitation and the promise of a lot of money if she would “meet” with men.

“So I go and I hang out. She texts me on Snapchat, basically, she didn't specify exactly what,(...) like what we were doing to make the money. She was like, you know, just come over and we'll talk about it. She was like, but you can make like $400 to $600 a day.”

They met at Granados’ hotel suite off Dupont Road.

“She kind of went a little bit more in depth about it. She didn't say it was like sexual favors. She said just meetings with dudes. So in my mind, I was thinking like, you know, at first I was thinking just like, you know, like dinner dates or like just sitting and talking and stuff like that. I didn't realize that it was actually like sexual encounters until the very first meeting.(…)" 

Harley went to those “meetings” with men under threat, the kind of threats she remembered getting from Hassenplug who would tell her that her mother “wouldn’t wake up,” if she reported the abuse.

“She told me all about how she's pulled guns on girls and like she's beat girls and she's beat girls up for not giving her her money or trying to run off on her and all types of stuff.”

During that time from October 2023 until April 2024 when Granados got “locked up,” Leticia “pulled guns on her” three times and made two male friends hold her down, beat her up and pull out her hair.

The beating occurred when Leticia and the two others realized that another girl Granados had solicited - there were several - was all over the news as a missing minor.

Harley wanted to take her home even though the girl didn’t want to go back. Leticia wanted to keep her in her employ.

Granados and Harley had picked the new girl up in Bluffton and the first thing she asked for was liquor and sex, Harley said.

During the time the minor - about a month away from her 18th birthday - was under Granados’ violent influence, she and Harley plotted to pool their money and get out of there. 

They became victims together and that is the reason the victim asked for leniency after Harley was charged, Harley believes. The victim also wanted to drop the no contact order against Harley, but the court did not agree.

Charges for the promotion of child sex trafficking were filed against Granados and Harley in December 2024. 

This year, in February, once again, Zent was the sentencing judge for plea deals proposed by the Allen County prosecutor’s office.

Leticia, seen as the female pimp in the operation, was sentenced to 12 years in prison, six of those years suspended.

Harley got four years probation.

The case created something of an uproar and, on the face of it, it’s not hard to see why.

The probable cause by Indiana State Police detective Brandon Davenport was damning. When the minor asked to be picked up, she told the detective that her two phones were thrown out the window. 

Harley said she was the driver and it was Leticia who took them after the minor told them her parents used the phones to monitor her.

The explicit photos taken of the two women were taken amid threats. 

“[Leticia] would say all the time that she purposely looks for girls who are either in active addiction or are going through stuff because she knows that they'll make money and that they'll do what they need to do,” Harley said.

The probable cause affidavit backed up that claim. 

The detective wrote that images taken and uploaded to megapersonals.com and skipthegames.com showed Harley and the victim together in sexual poses that “were not selfies and confirmed there was a third person taking the photographs, believed to be Leticia Granados.

He also wrote of the violence intended: “Leticia Granados threatened Victim about previous girls that she had hit; she wanted to warn victim. Leticia Granados said she would get mad when people didn’t pay so Victim always gave Leticia Granados all the cash and Leticia Granados divided the money.”

The last few paragraphs of the probable cause indicate that Granados was in control of the situation.

As usual, no charges have been filed against any clients. Harley described them as older men who seemed to be blue collar, although one told her he was a lawyer. A “meeting” cost $160.

With Granados in prison, Harley, her mother and stepdad have tried to return to a normal life, but it is difficult with the terms of Harley’s probation.

She is registered as a Tier 2 sex offender, she says, which prohibits her from living within 1000 feet of a daycare, school or playground, in effect ruling out living with her mother. The list of available housing is extremely limited, making it nearly impossible to find a place to live.

A change to her classification to Tier 1 would allow her live with her folks and have her baby in a safe environment. They are all under treatment at the BHG Center and are grateful for the counselors there.

Currently, Harley is nearly seven months pregnant and has a job lined up, but without a place to live, there is the threat she will go to prison.

What happens at her court hearing Tuesday will affect her future and her unborn son’s.

“We all have our stories. I’ve been through hell and back and I just want to get past this. I want to raise my son. I’m not this monster that everybody thinks I am.”

She met that monster when she was eight years old.

Sources: Probable Cause affidavits for Sean Hassenplug and Harley Cooley; Allen County Sheriff’s Department - sex offender registry; interviews in 2017 and 2018 with Beth Cooley and another affected mother; interviews this year with Beth and Harley Cooley; online court documents.