Killer freed 30 years after life sentence Torsrud shot and killed Questell in woods near Wick Field in Milwaukee. He and another teen buried Questell in a rough grave they and some other friends had dug earlier.
Victim’s sister: Torsrud is reformed, remorseful
Thirty years after her brother was murdered, Raquel Questell hasn’t forgotten the day she heard the news.
Francisco Questell, 19, a popular south side DJ, had been missing four days when his sister, then 16, heard he’d been killed.
She told a judge Monday about sharing the news with her mother as she walked home from the grocery store, and her father as he pulled in the driveway from work, the screaming and misery that followed, and the huge hole that remains in the family.
Yet she said she believed her brother’s killer, Phillip Torsrud, who was 16 at the time, is reformed and remorseful and that she didn’t oppose an earlier release from the life sentence he was given for the 1990 crime.
At an unusual hearing, a judge granted a joint request from Torsrud’s lawyer and prosecutors to vacate his conviction for first-degree intentional homicide and accepted his guilty pleas to amended charges of second-degree intentional homicide and armed robbery.
Circuit Judge David Borowski sentenced Torsrud to the maximum on each — 20 years — consecutively, but under the law at the time, he would have served only two-thirds of the term before being released on parole.
After his release in the next day or two, Torsrud, 46, will spend nine years on parole.
Torsrud could be the first of dozens of inmates serving life or extremely long sentences for crimes committed as juveniles whose cases are being reviewed for similar early releases.
The Public Interest Justice Initiative, a joint project between Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm’s office and the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, was launched in 2019 after the Remington Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School found that more than half the 128 inmates serving life sentences for juvenile offenses were from Milwaukee County.
Most of the cases predate 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court began issuing a series of rulings that found — as far as juveniles are concerned — death sentences, mandatory life sentences and life without parole sentences for anything less than homicide violate the Constitution.
The decisions relied on new scientific understanding of adolescent brain development, suggesting teens are more susceptible to peer pressure, rash reactions to stress and more likely to change outlooks and behaviors with age and programming.
Torsrud shot and killed Questell in woods near Wick Field in Milwaukee. He and another teen buried Questell in a rough grave they and some other friends had dug earlier.
Torsrud didn’t know Questell. Torsrud’s older friends had convinced him, over several days, that Questell was going to harm or kill them over a drug debt. They obtained a gun from an older acquaintance, practiced shooting, and set up a meeting for Oct. 13, 1990, when Demian McDermott brought Questell to the woods where Torsrud was waiting.
McDermott and James Love had convinced Torsrud that Questell would have a 9mm handgun. When he reached behind his back after Torsrud pointed his gun, Torsrud fired, then shot Questell a second time.
After police found the body, Torsrud went to confession and then turned himself in to police without telling his parents. His attorney, Kathleen Stilling, said Monday that showed “the seeds of the better man were in the boy.”
He was tried as an adult, convicted and sentenced to life, eligible to seek parole after 35 years. While incarcerated, he earned high school and college degrees, learned to weld, became a mentor to others, and was, in general, a model prisoner.
He’s written three books — one about politics, a collection of philosophical essays and a spy novel set in Russia.
“I know everything I’ve done takes a backseat to his loss,” Torsrud said of his victim. “I know my work will never be done and I can only try to improve the future.”
Borowski said in the hundreds of homicides and other serious felonies he’s presided over, he’s never heard of a defendant confessing to a priest before going to police.
He said extensive research about the case and Torsrud convinced him Torsrud was manipulated by his older friends, and has been an exemplary inmate for more than 20 years.
“You’re getting a second chance,” he told Torsrud. “The actions you take over the next 15 years won’t make up for what you did in 1990, but it could be a step in the right direction.”
McDermott had turned 18 five days before the killing. He was also convicted of first-degree intentional homicide, as a party to the crime, and sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility starting in 2025. Love, though he conspired in the plot, was not present the day of the killing and was not charged.