By Jackson Mefford –
During his 12 years as a Navy SEAL, Craig Sawyer captured Iraqi prisoners, executed search and rescue and performed sniper operations. But true ugliness hit him at home.
“My wife woke me up and said, ‘Craig, it’s Aspen. She’s been raped,’” he said. “And I woke up out of a deep sleep in go mode.”
His daughter Aspen, 18, had been raped while walking near the University of Arizona.
Sawyer told the detective, “You’d better be quick if you plan to beat me to him.”
Overnight, Craig’s mission changed from fighting evils abroad to fighting evil in America. Today, Craig runs Veterans for Child Rescue (V4CR) running sting operations to bust predators.
Craig Sawyer joined the Marine Corps in 1983, hoping to work in military intelligence and reconnaissance. “I felt compelled to go and confront and fight those people (the terrorist) and stop them,” he said.
But since he couldn’t get into the elite fighting he wanted in the Marines, he switched to Navy and became a SEAL in 1986.
Sawyer joined SEAL Team 1 and served in the Persian Gulf War.
“It was an honor to serve with such amazing warriors,” he said. “All glory for anything I’ve done goes to King Jesus!”
After returning from the war in 1991, Sawyer became a SEAL sniper instructor and then joined SEAL Team 6, also known as DEVGRU, one of the most secretive military groups in the US military who carry out some of the most important and risky missions around the world.
After leaving the Navy in 1999, he worked as a federal Air Marshal, a high-threat security guard in conflict areas, a tactical trainer, worked in television and film and a rhino conservationist.
Ironically, he was transitioning to anti-sex trafficking operations when his own daughter, Aspen, was raped.
“I spent my life in counterterrorism. I worked at the highest level of the SEAL team counterterrorism realm,” Sawyer said. “And I learned that children are being terrorized, traumatized here in the United States worse than anything that I was fighting to prevent elsewhere.”
In 2016, there were 8,042 cases of child trafficking in America, with 8,223 individual children being trafficked (some cases have multiple victims – probably only a fraction of the real number of victims.
In 2025, there were 15,085 cases.
In 2017, Sawyer founded V4CR, hiring former soldiers, law-enforcement and other specialists while working with the state government.
V4CR created Contraland, a documentary using real footage from actual law enforcement stings. The movie, a play off of the word contraband, is free V4CR’s website.
Aspen fought off her attacker. Then she fought against other predators. Making the jump from survivor to advocate, Aspen has spoken on a documentary and showed up at a 2018 Nascar racing event.
Against her father’s wishes, Aspen has worked with law enforcement sting operations as a decoy, the bait to get the predators.
Today, Sawyer continues to run joint sting operations with the federal, state, and city governments in many states including Texas, Idaho, Connecticut and West Virginia (where V4CR’s main headquarters are).
V4CR even works at high-level events such as the Super Bowl.
