An 18-year-old sex trafficking victim imprisoned for killing the man who raped her cut off her electronic tracking device and escaped the correctional facility where she was serving her probation sentence.
Pieper Lewis fled the Fresh Start Women’s Center in Des Moines, Iowa, around 6.15am on Friday, according to a probation violation report. A warrant was issued for her arrest but as of Monday morning, there was still no sight of the teen’s whereabouts.
Hours after she broke out of the women’s residential corrections facility, the probation report asked for her deferred judgment to be revoked and have her original sentence imposed, KCCI Des Moines News reported.
She could now face up to 20 years behind bars.
Lewis stabbed Zachary Brooks, a married father of two, to death in a Des Moines apartment in June 2020.
The teen alleged that Brooks had trafficked her against her will and raped her multiple times. She said that she killed him in a fit of rage. Police and prosecutors did not dispute that Lewis was sexually assaulted and trafficked.
The teen pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and willful injury and received a deferred judgment from the Polk County District Judge, David Porter.
In September, the judge ordered that Lewis pay $150,000 to the killer’s family in restitution, as required by Iowa law.
Under the judge’s ruling, Lewis would also have five years’ probation, serve 200 hours of community service and pay an additional $4,000 in civil penalties.
Lewis first met Brooks when she was a runaway sleeping in hallways before he took her in.
The teen’s broken relationship with the woman who adopted her out of foster care at the age of 3 prompted her to run away, Lewis said.
Officials have said Lewis was a runaway who was seeking to escape from an abusive adopted mother and was sleeping in the hallways of an apartment building when an older man took her in before forcibly trafficking her to other men for sex.
Prosecutors had called the probation sentence she was given in September merciful for a teen who endured horrible abuse, although some questioned the $150,000 restitution she was ordered to pay.
A GoFundMe campaign raised over $560,000 to cover the restitution and pay for her other needs.
Polk County Judge David Porter told Lewis that her probation sentence ‘was the second chance you asked for. You don´t get a third,’ the Des Moines Register reported.
If Lewis had successfully completed five years of closely supervised probation her prison sentence would have been expunged.
