Kenosha Gave Trafficking Survivor Chrystul Kizer Eleven Years After She Shot the Man Accused of Selling Her
KENOSHA, Wisconsin — Chrystul Kizer won the right to tell a jury that killing Randall Volar III was a direct result of being trafficked. She never put that defense in front of twelve people. On August 19, 2024, Kenosha County Circuit Judge David Wilk sentenced her, then 24, to 11 years in prison and five years of extended supervision after a May 2024 plea to second-degree reckless homicide. The charge carries up to 25 years. The plea avoided a trial on first-degree intentional homicide, which in Wisconsin is a mandatory life sentence. She received credit for 570 days already spent in jail. Because the judge did not make her eligible for early-release programs, the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office has said she is expected to leave prison in 2033. She must submit a DNA sample and attend a restitution hearing. The Associated Press account of the sentencing matches the judgment The AEGIS Alliance reviewed. Public records place her at Taycheedah Correctional Institution. No later published order has vacated the plea, cut the term, or granted clemency.
Kizer was 17 in June 2018 when, prosecutors say, she shot Volar, 34, at his Kenosha home, set the house on fire, and left in his BMW. Wisconsin charges 17-year-olds as adults. The original complaint listed first-degree intentional homicide, arson, vehicle theft, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Kizer has said she met Volar on a trafficking site when she was 16, that he abused her and sold her, and that she shot him after he tried to assault her again. Investigators later found that Volar had been abusing multiple underage girls and had recorded some of the abuse. Kenosha police arrested and charged him in February 2018. He was released without bail. The prosecutor’s office has said it was still building that case when he was killed four months later.
That sequence is the fact the sentence cannot tidy up. A charged adult walked out of jail. A teenager who says she was one of his victims later faced a mandatory life count. More than a million people — some counts of the petition passed 1.5 million signatures — asked that the charges against Kizer be dropped. Courts do not poll petitions. Her bail started at $1 million, dropped to $400,000 in 2020, and was paid with community bond money after nearly two years in custody. Bail was later revoked. She was taken back into custody in February 2024 after she left Wisconsin following a January 2024 disorderly-conduct charge. The public campaign made her name national. It did not write the judgment.
A 2008 statute, a 2022 ruling, and a plea that set both aside
In 2022 the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that Kizer could invoke a 2008 state law, signed by then-Governor Jim Doyle, that gives trafficking victims an affirmative defense for offenses committed as a “direct result” of being trafficked. The ruling did not dismiss the homicide. It said a jury could hear the defense. Prosecutors would still have had to prove the shooting, the fire, and the car. Jurors would still have had to decide whether the trafficking link was close enough to the statute’s words. By pleading guilty to reckless homicide, Kizer traded that argument for a number that was not life. The defense her lawyers spent years winning was available on the morning of the plea and unused by the afternoon.
At sentencing, prosecutors argued the shooting was planned, not a spasm of self-defense in the moment. Defense lawyers asked the court to weigh the trauma already documented in Volar’s own case file. Kizer, who had been baptized in jail, quoted scripture and told the court, “I understand that I committed sins that put the Volar family in a lot of pain,” and asked for generosity in the number. Judge Wilk said he was “well aware of your circumstances surrounding your relationship with Mr. Volar,” and then delivered the line that became the official last word: “you are not permitted to be the instrument of his reckoning.” Survivor advocates said 11 years would chill other people still trapped in exploitation. A USA Today column called the term extreme given the abuse investigators had already found. Wilk’s bench is not a column. Wisconsin homicide law does not contain a clause that says a trafficking victim may kill the trafficker and walk. The 2008 statute is an affirmative defense. It is not a pardon.
The arithmetic is grim and clear, and it is the reason the plea existed. First-degree intentional homicide in Wisconsin is life. Second-degree reckless homicide tops out at 25 years of confinement. Eleven years plus five years of extended supervision is less than half that cap and is not life. Credit for 570 days shortens the remaining prison calendar. The refusal to allow early-release programs lengthens it again. Public defenders have said 2033 is the expected exit. That date is not a promise from the Department of Corrections. It is what you get when you add the judgment, subtract the jail credit, and remove the programs the judge blocked. The AEGIS Alliance has watched other trafficking files turn a victim into a defendant and then into a sentence, including the federal investigation that followed Jeffrey Epstein’s death and the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell. Kenosha is smaller. The machinery is recognizable.
The man who was charged, released, and then killed
Volar’s February 2018 charging document is the part of this story that should have ended the danger before a 17-year-old picked up a gun. Police had him. A prosecutor had a file that included recordings of abuse of underage girls. He went home without posting bail because no bail was required. The girls in his orbit did not go home to safety just because a complaint existed. When one of them later became the defendant, the state had no trouble holding her on a seven-figure bond. That imbalance is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the docket. It is also why the BBC, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and Court TV all treated a Kenosha homicide as a national argument about what a trafficking defense is worth on paper.
The argument did not produce an acquittal, because there was no trial. It produced a bargain. People who wanted a jury to hear “direct result” can say the plea betrayed the Supreme Court win. People who wanted a homicide punished can say 11 years is what a planned shooting, a fire, and a stolen car were worth once life was off the table. Both descriptions can be true without either one being the whole file. Kizer’s lawyers had to weigh a mandatory life count, a defendant who had already spent years in custody, a revoked bond, and a jury that would have seen the fire and the BMW as well as the trafficking evidence. They chose the number. Judge Wilk accepted it and then refused to let prison programs shorten it further.
Wisconsin’s rule that 17-year-olds are adults is the other machine in the case. A 17-year-old who shoots a 34-year-old in Kenosha does not start in juvenile court. She starts on the same grid as an adult, which is why the original complaint could carry life. An adult docket does not pause because the defendant was a minor when the exploitation began. It pauses if a prosecutor dismisses, a jury acquits, or a judge takes a plea. Kenosha took the plea. The 2008 defense remains on the books for the next defendant who can prove the trafficking link and who is willing to risk twelve strangers. This defendant did not take that risk. Readers who follow The AEGIS Alliance on crime and U.S. news, including coverage of stings aimed at adults who target children, will recognize the split: the system is severe with the person it has in the courtroom and slow with the person it has already let go home.
The Kenosha file is not a parable with a clean moral. A man who recorded the abuse of minors is dead. A woman who says she was one of those minors is in a state prison until the early 2030s, then on supervision. A statute that was supposed to let a jury weigh the trafficking sat unused. Judge Wilk’s line about reckoning is the official last word. The unofficial one is a housing record at Taycheedah and a release year, 2033, that assumes nothing about the sentence changes. Nothing published since August 19, 2024, has changed it.
If you or someone you know is being trafficked, the National Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-373-7888, 24 hours a day.
