In a story that involves both a jailbreak and breaking a minor out of a group home, the dust has finally settled, and the feds won a conviction of Sacramento man Robert Pierre Duncan.
Back in 2018, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department recovered a teenage human trafficking victim, and had her placed in a group home. A few weeks later, the trafficking suspect and his accomplice merely broke her out, and had her back on their job. The FBI arrested the trafficking suspect in October 2019, and he managed to escape custody too — though the feds did find him a few blocks away.
But the whole mess now seems fortunately resolved, as the Department of Justice announced today that they’d won a jury conviction of the trafficker, 26-year-old Robert Pierre Duncan of Sacramento.
“Between September and October 2018, Duncan recruited a 17-year-old girl to engage in prostitution in Oakland and San Francisco,” according to a release from the Department of Justice. “He frequently drove the victim to areas known for prostitution activity where he caused her to have sex with strangers for money, which he kept. Duncan also posted online prostitution ads depicting the victim and harbored the victim at an Oakland motel so she could have sex with sex buyers. In late September 2018, Sacramento County Sheriff’s Deputies recovered the victim.”
“However, a few weeks later, Duncan, working with his co-conspirator, Eva Christian, 25, extracted the victim from a children’s group home in the middle of the night. The next day, Duncan put the victim back to work engaging in prostitution on the streets of Oakland.”
The release adds that, “On May 31, 2019, Duncan was arrested by FBI agents in Sacramento. Shortly after his arrest, Duncan broke out of custody and fled through Midtown Sacramento until he was finally apprehended several blocks away from the scene of his initial arrest.”
Christian has already pled guilty and is awaiting sentencing. Duncan faces a maximum penalty of life in prison, and a $250,000 fine. The sex trafficking of a minor count carries a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence.
Image: @tingeyinjurylawfirm via Unsplash
