Wisconsin v. Kizer: What a Recent Conviction Tells Us About Race, Justice and Who is Protected in Kenosha, WI.
In the early afternoon of October of 1998, I was arrested near Kenosha, Wisconsin at a non-violent protest against a rodeo that was happening on the fairgrounds. I need to get the specifics out of the way just to remove distractions but I promise that there is a much more important and compelling story to tell on the other side of it.
I was arrested for displaying a cattle prod, misidentified as a stun gun, to let people know what they were supporting when they gave money to the rodeo, the violence behind the scenes. Using a megaphone, I told people in their cars pulling into the parking lot that this instrument was part of why the horses and bulls come out of the chutes bucking: They have been shocked with up to 7,000 or more volts of electricity.
Cut to the chase, an officer with the local sheriff’s department charged seemingly out of nowhere at the small group of protestors I was with and demanded that I “drop my weapon.” It took me a few seconds to realize that he was talking about me and the cattle prod, not a weapon to my understanding, that was nowhere near the attendees driving past us.
Of course, it gets weirder and more complicated from there, but I was cuffed, put in the wagon, spent the night in jail, was released the next day with a lawyer John and my friend found, had to return again and again to a courtroom in Kenosha from my home in Chicago to fight a felony charge that had a maximum sentence of two years in prison and $10,000, had the charges dropped after a few months by the DA, then had the charges reissued when the old DA was replaced with a new one. Then I very reticently accepted a misdemeanor plea deal of disturbing the peace with a $100 fine. (Long inhalation, I know, that was a lot to read.) Being stubbornly, stupidly principled, I wanted to fight the charges because a) I was not carrying a stun gun but also, b) if cattle prods were found to be interchangeable with stun guns, it could have changed a lot about how animals in the Dairy State are treated. (Cattle prods are commonly used to get so-called livestock onto trucks driving them to slaughter.) In any case, John and I, newly married, ran out of money and time so I begrudgingly accepted the much lesser charge. It was in the days before crowdfunding and all that. As it was, we ended up spending all our wedding money on lawyer’s fees.
The ultimate point was Kenosha needed their conviction to leave me alone. The attitude expressed to me by my lawyer was, “Look, they compromised on the original charge. You need to give a little. They’re not going to let you go without a conviction.” He was right. I did some quality-of-life calculations and needed to move on with my life.
Yesterday, I read for the first time about the conviction of Chrystul Kizer, who killed Randall Volar of Kenosha in June of 2018. She was 17 at the time, and he was 34. Ms. Kizer, now 24, is Black and according to her defense, had been trafficked by Volar since she was 16 the year prior after he saw her post offering sex work on a forum, which she did to help feed her siblings. Obviously, this is a tragic situation. She was still being trafficked and abused by Volar by the time that the Kenosha Police Department gathered ample evidence that Volar, who had money from cryptocurrency, was operating a child sex trafficking ring.
You see, in February of 2018, a 15-year-old girl had called 911 for help after fleeing Volar’s house, and was found roaming the street drugged and half-naked in the night. (Does this sound eerily familiar to those aware of Jeffrey Dahmer, who also was given wide clearance to prey on vulnerable people of color in nearby Milwaukee despite police interactions with him? It should. I’ll get to that.) The Kenosha police searched Volar’s house ten days after this girl notified them and seized evidence, which included videos of underaged Black girls, some as young as 12, and videos of him sexually assaulting the minors, forcing them to perform sexual acts on him prior to being sold into sex work. Ms. Kizer was identified as one of the minors in the videos. Despite all this evidence, the police arrested Volar but he was released the same day and no bail was posted. No case was even entered into the system.
By the time Ms. Kizer shot her perpetrator, set fire to his house in an attempt to destroy the evidence of his killing and fled in his car, she had already been victimized by this sex offender and by the criminal justice system in Kenosha and Wisconsin for failing to protect her, but also by a society that does not value or give many options to poor Black girls. On Monday, when she was convicted by Kenosha County Judge David Wilk of reckless homicide for killing her abuser and sentenced to 11 years in prison, when she did not receive trauma-informed consideration in her case, Chrystul Kizer, two years older than my son, was failed grievously once again.
The first thing I noticed in my overnighter at Kenosha County Jail was I was the only white person in my cell block. Everyone else was Black, except one woman of Mexican heritage. Nearly 65% of Kenosha is white; just 10% is Black. Why was everyone I saw of color, nearly all Black? I was an object of curiosity pulling my crunchy little mat into the hall of the overcrowded cellblock to sleep on. Why is that white girl here? Finally someone asked. I told them, feeling stupid and embarrassed. One shook her head at the ridiculousness of it. “You’ll get out tomorrow, though,” she told me, resignation in her voice. I nodded. I knew she was right. When I was, in fact, brought before a judge the next day and was taken back to the cell to wait to be released, the silence was deafening. I said goodbye and I felt like the world’s luckiest person, a fortune I had nothing to do with creating for myself. It was unearned but it was mine. Though I had to jump through so many more hoops to get my entanglement with Kenosha behind me, it was nothing.
That night, safe in my home, I stood in the shower and I scrubbed my skin until it was raw, trying to get all the prison off of me and down the drain.
I only learned about Chrystul Kizer’s case yesterday so I am not trying to act like an expert, but even if the abuser were not actively assaulting her when he was killed, why is she in prison and why was he, a known sexual predator, not, but instead set loose to continue assaulting and exploiting the Black girls of his community? Ironically, if the Kenosha Police Department had done their job, if this was a fair, just and competent legal system, Volar would still be alive because he’d have been arrested, tried, found guilty and thrown in prison instead of having been killed by one of his victims.
Does the criminal justice system take into account trauma and PTSD? How it’s not rational but reasonable? The kind of rage one would feel toward someone who’d abused them again and again? The fury at being trafficked as a teenager without protectors? I am a survivor but I cannot even begin to wrap my mind around what it would do to me psychologically to see my abuser again and again. That defeated resignation in the voice of my brief
cell-mate; imagine what it would take for you to reach that point by 17 years of age, knowing there was no one protecting you.
The officers who in Wisconsin who handed a victimized child, an injured, dazed, scared, bleeding boy that two Black teenaged girls tried to intervene on behalf of back to Jeffrey Dahmer and rebuffed follow-up calls were found guilty of gross negligence in 1992, but, on appeal, the officers were reinstated to the Milwaukee Police Department in 1994 with back pay totaling more than $100,000 and were named “Officers of the Year” by the Milwaukee Police Association for their “righteous battle to regain their jobs”.
One of the officers transferred to a new location in Wisconsin and became a police captain, working there until retiring in 2019, one assumes, with full pension. The other served as president of the Milwaukee Police Association from 2005 to 2009. He only retired from the Milwaukee police force in 2017.
The man who arrested me under false pretenses — again, small potatoes, I know — is now captain of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department.
Where is the justice for what happened to Chrystul Kizer? Yes, her abuser is dead but what about the criminal justice system that had a sexual abuser of children in their grip as well as a seeming mountain of plausible evidence against him to be used in trial, who let him go to continue abusing and traumatizing? Where is her justice from the system in Kenosha that criminally neglected to protect and defend this girl and the ones like her?
It stands out to me that Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley didn’t recommend a specific amount of prison time but wanted her to receive some time of imprisonment. Ms. Kizer did not pursue a trial in the case; if she had, she could have faced a possible life sentence. Instead, she pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of 2nd degree reckless homicide. The DA could have recommended time served but he did not. Just like how I had to “give a little” in my lawyer’s negotiations with the DA. Kenosha County has the highest per capita rate of sending people to prison in Wisconsin. They’ve got to get that win. Unless she gets out earlier, Chrystul Kizer will be in her mid-30s when she is released from prison.
My advice? Don’t get arrested in Kenosha, especially not if you’re Black. Sexual abusers and cops ought to be fine, though. Kyle Rittenhouse, too. It seems vigilantism is sometimes okay.
Marla Rose is cofounder of VeganStreet.com.
