Chrystul Kizer sentenced to 11 years in prison for killing the man who sexually trafficked her

Chrystul Kizer was sentenced to 11 years in prison, followed by five years of extended probation, after pleading guilty to killing a man who sexually abused her when she was a minor. She will receive credit for about a year and a half of time already spent behind bars.

Kizer, now 24, appeared before Judge David Wilk in Kenosha County District Court on Monday morning.

She was 17 when she shot 34-year-old Randy Volar III twice in the head, set his house on fire and fled in his BMW in 2018, according to Kenosha County prosecutors. In Wisconsin's criminal justice system, 17-year-olds charged with a crime are treated as adults.

The case brought international attention to the problem of sex trafficking, particularly against black women and girls. Kizer is black and Volar was white.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that Kizer's lawyers could rely on a 2008 state law in their defense. That law protects victims of human trafficking from prosecution for crimes they committed as a “direct result” of trafficking.

Had the case gone to court, such an application of this law would have been unprecedented in Wisconsin.

In May, however, Kizer agreed to plead guilty to a single count of second-degree manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of more than two decades in prison.

In her guilty plea, Kizer admitted that she acted “criminally recklessly” when she killed Volar with a gun.

Kizer had previously been charged with a number of other crimes, including first-degree premeditated murder, which could have resulted in a life sentence.

On Monday, Kizer's public defenders asked Wilk to consider the trauma Kizer suffered. Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley argued she planned the murder so she could steal Volar's car.

Charges of jumping bail create pressure for agreement

In the six years since her arrest for Volar's murder, Kizer has spent much of her time in prison and in custody.

In 2020, amid the rise of the #MeToo movement and protests against racial injustice, citizen groups secured Kizer's release from the Kenosha County Jail after raising the $400,000 required for her bail. Previously, Wilk had agreed to lower her bail, which he had previously set at $1 million.

But earlier this year, Kizer landed back in jail after being charged with disorderly conduct in Milwaukee. After that incident, authorities say she fled to Louisiana without telling the court her new address, which violated the terms of her bail. As a result of those actions, she racked up additional bail jumping charges, but those have since been dropped as part of her plea deal in the murder case.

Before Kizer accepted the deal, prosecutors filed a motion arguing that jurors should be allowed to consider evidence from the Milwaukee incident when deciding whether to convict Kizer in the murder trial.

At the time of his death, Kenosha police were investigating Volar for child sex trafficking, and police seized evidence, including videos, from his home months before Kizer shot Volar.

If the case had gone to trial, Kizer's lawyers would have wanted to show jurors a video that Volar recorded sexually assaulting Kizer and other girls. Wilk agreed in March that such evidence could be used, despite objections from prosecutors.

Kizer's lawyers demand treatment, not long imprisonment

On Monday, Kizer's lawyers argued that it would make no sense to sentence her to a long prison term. Instead, they asked the judge to allow her to return to her family in Milwaukee. They provided a list of services that can support Kizer, including job placement and counseling for victims of sexual exploitation.

A social history presented by Kizer's defense team describes how Kizer suffered trauma in her childhood, including sexual abuse at the hands of her mother's boyfriend.

Volar met Kizer through Backpage.com.

Those documents also describe how, in the fall of 2017, two elderly women called Kizer to a parked car as she was leaving school and convinced her to post on Backpage.com to make money. Backpage has since been shut down by the federal government.

Volar began sexually abusing Kizer after finding her through Backpage, giving her cash and other gifts and once paying her bail after she was charged with auto theft when she was a minor, court documents state.

“He told me I had to pay him back,” Kizer wrote in a letter to the judge. “After I was released on bail, he arranged dates with other men who had sex with me in various hotels. I didn't know at the time that what I was doing was illegal. I was only 16, almost 17, at the time. Randy gave me drugs to make me feel comfortable going on the dates.”

Under Wisconsin law, any use of a child in the commercial sex industry is defined as sex trafficking. Prosecutors admit Volar violated that law when he paid Kizer for sex while she was a minor.

District Attorney Graveley had previously stated that he had no evidence that Volar had sold Kizer to other men.

Before Kizer's conviction, the National Black Women's Justice Institute was among the advocacy groups that urged the judge to grant Kizer “healing services” instead of a prison sentence.

“Courts across the country are criminalizing Black women and girls for surviving abuse and sexual violence,” the group's executive director, Sydney McKinney, wrote in a statement earlier this summer. “Incarceration only exacerbates and intensifies the harm and resembles the coercive control and loss of bodily autonomy that sex trafficking survivors experience at the hands of traffickers.”

The statement also criticized Graveley, whose office filed charges against Kizer in 2018.

“The response of the prosecutor involved in this case is disappointing, upsetting and unacceptable, but not surprising,” the statement said. “Whether or not state law exists, prosecutors and judges must have deep compassion for survivors and use their discretion to choose healing-oriented alternatives rather than punishment for girls like Chrystul Kizer, who fought for her life in an impossible situation as a child.”

In victim statements, Volar's relatives demand maximum sentence

Before Monday's sentencing, several of Volar's relatives, including his father, Randy Volar Jr., filed victim impact statements calling Kizer's actions premeditated murder and calling for the maximum sentence.

“Did he make mistakes? Did he commit hidden sins of shame? Yes. Who among us doesn't,” Volar's aunt, Debbie Owczarzak, wrote to the judge. “But he is not here to tell his story. He is not here to make amends for his mistakes. He is not on trial, the defendant is, because Randy's life was taken from him by the defendant. He is dead. He has no voice.”

Volar's mother, Diana Volar, addressed her victim impact statement to Kizer. She submitted it as a three-page poem in rhyming couplet form.

“Someone pulled the trigger. Someone started a fire,” the poem says. “That no one ever has to feel this pain would be my greatest wish. / In these 'Halls of Justice' we seek the truth. / 'Rich white guy.' 'Poor white boy.' Who sat before you? / Some may judge. They may only see the color of skin. / We don't choose our friends in family by the color of skin.”

Editor's note: This story is being updated.