An Iowa teenager who stabbed her alleged rapist to death at age 15 escaped from a residential corrections facility on Friday, violating the probation orders she was handed after she pleaded guilty, according to reports.
Pieper Lewis, who is now 18, “walked away from the Fresh Start Women’s Center” on Friday at 6.19am after cleaving her electronic monitoring tracking device and her “whereabouts are unknown”, Jerry Evans, executive director of Iowa’s Fifth Judicial District Department of Corrections, told CNN.
Lewis pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and wilfully injuring her alleged rapist Zachary Brooks in a fit of rage in June 2020.
Then 15 years old, Lewis ran away from an abusive household and ended up living in the streets of a dangerous apartment complex in Des Moines with a man who sold her for drugs. She was given shelter by a man, Christopher Brown, who claimed to be her boyfriend but forced her to have sex with other men for money.
The same year, Mr Brown dropped her at the apartment of an acquaintance, Brooks, who forced her to drink alcohol and gave her intoxicating substances and raping her at least 30 times, her lawyers had said.
An Iowa judge sentenced Lewis to five years of supervised probation, recognising the two years she already spent at a juvenile facility and the violence she was subjected to.
Following her escape, officials have filed a probation violation report, suggesting her probation should be revoked.
“A warrant for her arrest was subsequently issued that remains outstanding,” Mr Evans said.
She can end up facing around two decades in jail for the alleged probation violation.
Lewis’ sentence became controversial and she earned the support of several people across the country after she was ordered to pay $150,000 in compensation to Brooks’s estate due to an Iowa law related to homicide convictions.
She later received an outpouring of support after a GoFundMe was created by Lewis’s ex-math teacher Leland Schipper, which was flooded with donations. The compensation money ordered by the court was raised within a day. It raised more than $550,000 which was used to cover her legal and other expenses.
During her sentencing, Lewis reiterated that she was forced to have sex with Brooks by a then-28-year-old man who she lived with. The younger man allegedly told her she couldn’t live with him for free and created a dating profile that he used to arrange sexual encounters between Lewis and other men.
He allegedly held a knife against her throat to force her to see Brooks for a second time, Lewis said. She then stabbed Brooks while he was sleeping, prosecutors said.
