South MS man charged with trafficking Coast teens to Pensacola is headed for trial

A South Mississippi man accused of taking two teenagers from Gulfport to Pensacola against their mother’s will is heading to trial in October for trafficking charges, court records show.

Police found the teenagers, aged 15 and 16, at a Hampton Inn & Suites in Pensacola.

Mark Curtis Wells, 53, of Biloxi is charged with two counts of forced labor or services by human trafficking, a felony, and two counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, a misdemeanor. Court records show authorities charged him in March after one of the teenagers called for help.

An officer went to the hotel Feb. 25. One of the girls told him Wells, a former landlord, picked them up from home the day before on the promise of $50 a day to work at his “Cracktech company,” the officer wrote in an arrest report.

“She was unsure what they would be doing,” the officer wrote. But Wells said “he would teach them the job later.”

The girls spent the night at Wells’s home, then left the Mississippi Coast for Pensacola.

In Pensacola, Wells switched hotels because one had too many people, the officer wrote. Gulfport police called one of the teenagers after her mother filed a missing persons report. Wells “got scared and left the room,” the arrest report says. “He didn’t want to deal with any cops.”

He then “took off” with one of the teenagers in a new white Chevy Tahoe with tinted windows, according to the report.

Authorities called the girls’s mother, who said she did not know the teenagers had left Mississippi and did not give permission for Wells to take her children, the report said.

Their mother started driving to Pensacola, the report said, but later texted one of the girls to say she ran out of gas on the interstate.

The Florida Department of Children and Families took custody of the teenagers.