Pieper Lewis, the Iowa teenager who killed a man she said raped her and was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay restitution to his family, escaped from a residential correctional facility, according to the Iowa Fifth Judicial District Department of Corrections.   

  Lewis “left the Fresh Start Women’s Center on Friday at 6:19 a.m. after cutting off the electronic monitoring device,” Jerry Evans, the district’s executive director, told CNN in an email Sunday morning.  “At this time, his whereabouts are unknown.”   

  Officials have filed a probation violation report, Evans said, recommending her revocation.  “A warrant was subsequently issued for her arrest which remains outstanding.”   

  Lewis was 15 when she killed a man she said had raped her multiple times, CNN previously reported.  She received a deferred sentence from Polk County Judge David Porter after pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and willful injury, and in September an Iowa judge ordered Lewis to pay $150,000 to his family in restitution, as required by law Iowa.   

  Porter also ordered Lewis to receive five years’ probation, serve 200 hours of community service and pay an additional $4,000 in civil penalties.  The deferred judgment meant it could be expunged from Lewis’ record.   

  The Des Moines facility Lewis escaped from is a residential corrections facility, according to the Fifth Judicial Circuit Department of Corrections website.  “It accepts residents of varying legal status,” who could be admitted “as a condition of probation or parole,” he says.  The program aims to “provide a safe and holistic approach to supervision that seeks to educate, support and empower all women to turn their lives around,” the website says.   

  Lewis pleaded guilty in June 2021 to killing Zachary Brooks, saying in a plea deal that the 37-year-old raped her multiple times in 2020. He was initially charged with first-degree murder.   

  In the plea deal, Lewis said she left home several times and ended up sleeping in the hallway of an apartment complex.   

  A man took her in, but she left when he became abusive, she wrote in the plea agreement.  She said she then moved in with another man who created an online dating profile for her and arranged for men to have sex with her for money.  She lived with this man, who told her she was his girlfriend, from April 2020 until he was arrested in Brooks’ murder, Lewis said.   

  She was introduced to Brooks in May 2020, and he gave her alcohol and marijuana and had sex with her five times while she was unconscious over a three-day period, she said.  Lewis learned what she had done, according to the plea, every time she regained consciousness and he was still on top of her.   

  On May 31, the man Lewis lived with confronted her with a knife after she refused his order to go to Brooks’ apartment to have sex with Brooks in exchange for marijuana, she wrote.  He finally agreed to go after he cut her throat, he said in the appeal.   

  At Brooks’ apartment, she was forced to drink shots of vodka and fell asleep, she wrote.  At one point she woke up and Brooks was raping her, she said.  Brooks fell asleep and Louis went to find her clothes.  When she returned to the bedroom, she saw him naked, she wrote.   

  “Suddenly I realized that Mr. Brooks had raped me again and I was overcome with rage.  Without thinking, I immediately grabbed the knife from his nightstand and started stabbing him,” Lewis said in the plea agreement.  “I further acknowledge that the multiple stab wounds I inflicted on Mr. Brooks ultimately resulted in his death.”   

  In ordering the community service, Judge Porter said it would give Lewis the opportunity to tell “her story to other young and vulnerable women in our community.   

  Lewis’ lawyer said he was pleased the court was deferring her sentence, praising her courage.  But advocates for victims of sexual assault disagreed.   

  “I don’t think justice was served,” KellyMarie Meek of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault said at the time, expressing concern about Lewis’ ability to handle her prison terms because of the severity of her trauma.   

  “Because I know that a lot of the ways that trauma survivors deal with their trauma is not very well understood by people who haven’t experienced trauma, which can sometimes lead to behaviors that get people into trouble,” she said.   

  Lewis is one of several teenagers – often of color – who have been prosecuted or convicted for killing their trafficker or attacker in recent years in the US.   

  “It’s just a story that unfortunately has become very familiar,” Cyntoia Brown told the “PBS Newshour.”  Brown, now 32, was sentenced to life in prison for killing a man she paid to rape her when she was a 16-year-old trafficker.  She was pardoned in 2019 after spending half her life behind bars.   

  “He was a victim in this situation,” Brown, now an advocate for criminal justice reform, said of Lewis.  “Not only will she have to serve time in a facility, but, over the next five years, anything she does could cause her to serve a 20-year sentence.  So, she’s not really free.”