A man accused of raping, beating and waterboarding his girlfriend at a Minnesota college has reached a plea deal that will send him to prison for up to seven and a half years.
Keanu Avery Labatte, 20, of Granite Falls, Minnesota, pleaded guilty to an amended charge of second-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Labatte admitted to strangling and sexually assaulting the woman, who was his new girlfriend, in his dorm room at St. Catherine University last September.
In exchange, prosecutors agreed to dismiss four other charges.
Labatte’s attorney, Thomas Beito, said Labatte admitted to strangling her during the assault.
Keanu Labatte, 20, accused of holding his girlfriend captive in his St. Catherine University dorm room for three days while he raped, beat and choked her, has accepted a plea deal that will sentence him to up to 7 1/2 years.
“He did not admit to the other kinds of lurid details that were involved here, such as waterboarding, or hostage-taking, or kidnapping,” Beito told The pioneer press. We deny that any of that happened.”
Labatte remains free on $80,000 bail ahead of his sentencing in November.
Beito said he will ask Judge Kellie Charles for probation, “because of his age, because of the fact that he has no significant criminal history.”
Dennis Gerhardstein, a spokesman for the Ramsey County District Attorney’s Office, said prosecutors will ask the judge to give Labatte the full seven-and-a-half-year sentence.
According to the complaint, Labatte went to campus on a Thursday to visit his girlfriend of two months.
After finding texts, images and content on social media that “enraged” him, he took her phone and began his campaign of brutality, according to the complaint.
It’s unclear what he saw on her phone that sparked the rage, but the criminal complaint says he used both hands around her neck to strangle her and threatened to kill her while calling her an idiot.
St. Catherine University Women’s Baccalaureate College is one of the largest private women’s colleges in the country.
She says she felt dizzy and saw stars while she was being strangled.
Labatte threatened to kill his family and reminded him that he had previously held a knife to the throat of a previous girlfriend.
She was strangled, threatened with a knife, forced to lie in a bathtub while Labatte covered her face with a washcloth and poured water over her, and sexually assaulted her, according to the complaint.
The St Catherine’s student said she was so terrified she lay down next to her captor and didn’t move for fear of what he would do next.
She says the worst part of the torture was on Saturday, when the waterboarding took place.
Labatte filled a bucket, forced her into the bathtub, where he placed a washcloth on her face and poured water over her.
That same day, threatening her with the knife, he grabbed her arm and told her he was looking for the right vein to cut deep enough so that she could not save herself.
It wasn’t until three days later, on Sunday morning, that she convinced him to let her go out to get food from the cafeteria.
He gave the victim his phone and told her she had to send him pictures of where she was so he could track her.
Once out of the dorm, she went to the campus security office and told them that her boyfriend had physically and sexually abused her.
Campus security then called police. Officers noticed marks on her neck, according to the complaint.
While speaking to police, Labatte called the victim repeatedly and she explained to authorities that he was paranoid because she was away from the dorm and ready to leave campus.
Labatte was found in the bedroom and arrested. After being read his rights, Labatte said, “I’m pleading my Fifth Amendment rights.”
During a search of the room, police found an orange, black and silver folding knife in the front pocket of a green backpack and a red wet wipe.
The mattress was found on the floor, and the victim says Labatte moved it to prevent others from hearing the bed creak during the sexual assaults.