Two men say they were asked to help recover DeAmber Brown’s daughter but walked away after determining the child was safe.
DALLAS — Editor’s note: See Part One of WFAA’s investigation “The Village” here.
When Thomas Gentile answered the phone on May 13, he thought it was going to be like other calls he was used to getting at all hours of the night.
A child was in trouble and needed rescuing.
Gentile is a professional martial arts fighter and part of a network of people who rescue children and women from human traffickers. Most recently, he was part of a group that rescued a 12-year-old boy in Oklahoma.
This story continues below.
He said that Lisa Bownds and Elizabeth Walker of Reflection Ministries told him he needed to rescue a baby from her mother, DeAmber Brown, in the Dallas area.
He enlisted Pete “Doc” Chambers, a former Green Beret also does anti-trafficking rescues through Remnant Ministry — another anti-human trafficking group. Chambers also recently ran unsuccessfully against Gov. Greg Abbott in the Republican primary for governor.
What Gentile and Chambers said they didn’t know at the time, but later learned, was that Brown was not a danger to her baby.
Brown had just lived through a five-month ordeal starting in November 2025 with her arrival at Midland’s Reflection Ministries, which took her in as a former human trafficking survivor. It ended with her locked up and her baby in the custody of Reflection Ministries founder Lisa Bownds. Brown eventually won her daughter back in April after a court fight – but she still felt uneasy.
“They’re obsessed with trying to get my baby back still,” she told WFAA.
In the weeks that followed, her fears turned out to be justified, according to police.
The rescuers
“We are experts at… finding things, needles in a stack of needles,” Chambers said.
“I’ll go anywhere in the world to rescue a child,” Gentile said.
Both men sat down with WFAA to tell the story of how they were asked to track down Brown and her baby by the leaders of Reflection Ministries. Details of their account are detailed in police affidavits filed in court.
Gentile said Lisa Bownds told him that Brown “was endangering the baby and that we needed to recover the baby.”
Court records show Bownds and Walker had traveled from Midland and met with Gentile and his associates in eastern Dallas County.
“It was insinuated that the baby was in danger in the hotel room while she was at work. That she could be there unattended or with ‘a pimp,’” Gentile said.
He says Bownds said Brown was a stripper — claiming she was trying to sell her baby, “chop it up” or put it down a garbage disposal.
“The baby was in that much danger,” Gentile said he and Chambers were told.
He said his main point of contact for the operation was Lisa Bownds.
Who is Lisa Bownds?
Lisa Bownds founded Reflection Ministries in 2016. Bownds has publicly said she survived human trafficking while in college in North Texas.
She’s also married to a prominent Midland banking executive.
In 2019, the ministry built a housing complex known as “The Village” to give trafficking survivors a place to stay.
In a year, the ministry’s revenue more than tripled — growing from $2.6 million in 2023 to nearly $9 million in 2024, according to the most recently available IRS filings.
‘That’s not our avenue’
Based on what Bownds told them, Gentile and his team began surveilling Dallas-area gentlemen’s clubs, searching for Brown.
“She wasn’t working there,” Chambers said. “She hadn’t been working in that business…She’s a mom working at an all-night café trying to make ends meet.”
Gentile said that Bownds told him that she had legal custody of Brown’s baby.
“She provided documentation, but even the documents we saw were the the judge’s court ordered rewarding the child back to DeAmber,” he said.
Bownds and her husband had filed for legal custody in Midland two months earlier. A Midland judge ruled against them.
Bownds “would make comments to us that that baby was going to leave with her, that she had the right to have that baby,” Gentile told WFAA.
Gentile says they explained that’s not how they operate — that they work with law enforcement and CPS and would request a welfare check.
But there was something else bothering them.
“Lisa was pretty intent on us finding something to get DeAmber thrown in jail,” Gentile said. “We’ve told her that’s not our avenue. We are not here as private investigators. We’re here to recover the safety of a child … She was on repeat the whole time.”
By the time the men approached Brown at work, they say they no longer believed Bownds or Walker.
“So, I just asked if we could have five minutes of her time, and then pretty much that we knew about a situation going on with a crazy lady after her child,” Gentile said.
Hours later, Gentile said he met with Bownds and Walker again.
“All I did was told them that we have proof that the baby’s safe and doing well and we’re bowing out,” he said. “They weren’t very happy with that.”
Brown said she is currently hiding.
“The number one thing is keeping baby safe,” she said.
“I don’t know what the ultimate end game was for Reflection Ministries and/or Ms. Bownds and/or Ms. Walker,” said Anthony Reed, Brown’s attorney.
“Why would you go through all that trouble?” he said. “There has to be something bigger.”
Under arrest
On June 2, Lisa Bownds was arrested in Midland County on suspicion of attempted kidnapping of a child in Dallas. The next day, Walker was arrested in Houston County accused of the same crime. Bownds was released on $150,000 bond, and Walker was released on $100,000 bond.
In late June, WFAA briefly spoke to Bownds outside the Reflection Ministries offices in Midland. “Thank you so much for being here, but you’ll have to talk to my attorney.”
“It is said that no good deed goes unpunished. This matter is a perfect example,” Bownds attorney, John Helms, said in a statement. “This investigation has been infected with false and unreasonable assumptions and, in some cases, simple misunderstandings that investigators failed to understand. There was no attempted kidnapping, but because this has escalated to the point of arrests, we will look forward to vindication in court.”
Walker’s lawyer, Brandi Young, said that given the pending criminal charges, Walker would not be giving interviews or making public statements.
“As this matter is currently before the courts, it would be inappropriate to comment outside of the proper legal proceedings,” Young wrote. “We look forward to defending Ms. Walker and are confident in the outcome of these proceedings will give an accurate account of the events surrounding these circumstances.”
In arrest affidavits written by an investigator with the North Texas Human Trafficking Unit, investigators allege Walker told Gentile “they normally adopt the babies out.”
A former Reflection Ministries employee told investigators that he met a couple at Elizabeth Walker’s house in December who said they were donors to the ministry – and that they were supposed to adopt Brown’s baby.
He showed investigators this text from Walker: “Please pray! This can’t be shared, but we are in the middle of recovery efforts on recovering the baby from a trafficking ring.”
It was sent May 12, the day before Thomas Gentile said he was dispatched to “rescue” Brown’s baby.
On June 11, investigators searched Reflection Ministries downtown Midland office for evidence tied to human trafficking, fraud, and money laundering, court documents show. Court documents show they seized three single-space pages of items, including a dozen computers, 32 empty pill bottles, several cell phones, multiple hard drives and digital storage devices, resident EBT and debit cards, along with dozens of boxes of resident, employee, payroll, financial, grant and victim records. They also seized records related to donations made to the nonprofit.
They also searched the ministry’s Village housing complex, seizing two computers, medication logs and files and a remote monitoring solutions network video recorder. Investigators also searched both Bownds and Walker’s cell phones.
Court records show investigators spoke with former residents who accused the ministry of taking their money, their identification, and threatening probation violations.