Man found guilty of sex-trafficking sentenced to 30 years in prison
A Sacramento man found guilty of sex trafficking after a weeklong trial earlier this year was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison, the U.S. Justice Department said.
A Sacramento man found guilty of sex trafficking after a weeklong trial earlier this year was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison, a U.S. Justice Department spokesman said.
According to a statement based on evidence presented at his March trial, Robert Duncan, 26, was on parole for assault with a semi-automatic firearm when he met a 17-year-old girl in September 2018.
Soon after, Duncan began driving the girl to areas in San Francisco and Oakland where she would have sex with paying customers, and he would keep money. Duncan also took out ads showing her, and kept her an Oakland motel where buyers would meet her.
Later that month, officers found and took the victim away, sending her to a children’s group home in Woodland in Yolo County. But Duncan and a co-conspirator, Eva Christian, 25, took the girl from the home in the middle of the night before bringing her back to Oakland to resume trafficking her.
After that, Duncan kept his victim at his apartment in Sacramento, but also tracked her through a GPS-tracking app on his cellphone “to monitor and direct the victim’s prostitution activity in Oakland,” the statement said in part.
Authorities arrested Duncan on May 31, 2019, in Sacramento, but not before he managed to run several blocks from officers in the city’s Midtown district who first took him into custody, and to injure an arresting officer badly enough to require surgery.
According to trial evidence, Duncan wrote Christian a letter asking her to say he didn’t know about his victim’s age and to claim she could not remember details about his trafficking. In a separate trial, Christian pleaded guilty on April 8, 2021 to a felony count of misprision and faces sentencing Sept. 19.
The cases were investigated by Oakland and Woodland police, the Sacramento County sheriff’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation with help from the state department of corrections and rehabilitation and the state justice department’s special-operations unit.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180.