Pieper Lewis: Teen who killed her alleged rapist and escaped Iowa jail is back in custody

Lewis, now 18, was booked into the Polk County Jail on Tuesday night

An Iowa teen who killed her alleged rapist at age 15 is back in custody after escaping from a residential corrections facility where she was serving probation.

Pieper Lewis, now 18, was booked into the Polk County Jail on Tuesday night, local news station KCCI reported. On Friday, Lewis had “walked away from the Fresh Start Women’s Center” in Des Moines after cleaving her electronic monitoring tracking device, the Department of Corrections, told CNN.

Polk County District Attorney John Sarcone previously said that a probation revocation hearing would be scheduled so a judge can determine how Lewis’s violations will be handled. A report filed after her escape stated that “it is further ordered that her deferred judgments (be) revoked and original sentence imposed,” per CNN.

Lewis pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and wilfully injuring her alleged rapist Zachary Brooks, 37, 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 Brooks, who forced her to drink alcohol, gave her intoxicating substances and raped her at least 30 times, her lawyers said in court.

During her sentencing in September, Lewis reiterated that she was forced to have sex with Brooks. Brown 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.

Lewis was initially charged with first-degree murder because the prosecution argued that she killed Brooks while he didn’t pose an immediate threat to her, as he was sleeping.

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. According to the Associated Press, during her time at the juvenile facility, Lewis obtained her GED and she had dreams of becoming a fashion designer.

She was also handed down a deferred judgement and her criminal record would have been expunged at the end of her five-year probation sentence.

Following her escape, officials have filed a probation violation report, suggesting her probation should be revoked.

Lewis could end up facing around two decades in jail for the alleged probation violation.

Pieper Lewis gives her allocution during a sentencing hearing in September 2022

Her 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 that does not offer exemptions for sexual assault victims.

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, totalling more than $550,000.

Mr Schipper, a middle school teacher at Des Moines Public Schools, had initially created the GoFundMe to cover legal costs for Ms Lewis, he told local news station WHO13. But after she was ordered to pay Brook’s family restitution, donations began to pour in.

“Pieper has five years of probation ahead of her; five years that she will be required to be nearly perfect to avoid facing 20 years in prison. Her path to true freedom will not be easy, and she is still a teenager that has experienced a lot of trauma,” Mr Schipper said at the time.