Sacramento man convicted of sex trafficking sentenced to 30 years
A Sacramento man who was convicted earlier this year of sex trafficking was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Monday, September 12.
Robert Pierre Duncan, 26, of Sacramento, was convicted in March by a federal jury in Sacramento of conspiracy to sex trafficking a child, sex trafficking of a child, and escape from custody.
Evidence presented at the trial showed that in September and October 2018, Duncan recruited a 17-year-old girl to engage in prostitution in Oakland and San Francisco. At the time, Duncan was on parole for assault with a semiautomatic firearm.
In late September 2018, the victim was recovered by law enforcement and to a children’s group home in Woodland. However, a few weeks later, Duncan, working with his co-conspirator, Eva Christian, 25, extracted the victim from the 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 and kept his child victim at his Sacramento apartment thereafter. Duncan managed his trafficking of her from this location, using his cellphone and a GPS tracking application on that phone to monitor and direct the victim’s prostitution activity in Oakland.
On May 31, 2019, Duncan was arrested but immediately broke free and fled through Midtown Sacramento until he was finally apprehended again several blocks away from the scene of his initial arrest. He fought the arresting officer so violently that the officer required surgery for an injury he sustained while arresting Duncan.
Duncan was also shown to have sent a letter to Christian—his co-defendant—in which he urged her to lie about Duncan’s trafficking of the 17-year-old victim. Duncan’s letter encouraged his co‑defendant to claim that she could not remember various details about Duncan’s trafficking of the child victim.
On April 8, 2021, co-defendant Christian pleaded guilty to one count of misprision of a felony. She is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 19, 2022.
