Man accused of holding girlfriend captive in Minnesota dorm room reaches plea deal

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A man accused of holding his girlfriend captive in her dorm room at a Minnesota college for three days while raping, beating and waterboarding her has reached a plea deal that provides for a sentence of up to 7 1/2 years.

Keanu Avery Labatte, 20, of Granite Falls, pleaded guilty Friday to an amended charge of second-degree criminal sexual conduct. He admitted to strangling and sexually assaulting the woman in her dorm room at St. Catherine University in September. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to dismiss four other charges, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

According to her lawyer, Thomas Beito, Labatte admitted to strangling her during the attack. “He did not admit to the other salacious details involved here, like the waterboarding, the hostage-taking or the kidnapping,” Beito said. “We deny that happened.”

Labatte remains free on $80,000 bail ahead of his sentencing on Nov. 4. Beito said he will ask Judge Kellie Charles for probation, “because of his age, because 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 7 1/2-year sentence.

According to the complaint, Labatte went to campus on a Thursday to visit his girlfriend, whom he had been dating for two months. After finding text messages, photos and social media content that infuriated him, he took her phone, according to the complaint. She was choked, threatened with a knife, forced to lie in a bathtub while Labatte covered her face with a washcloth and poured water on her, and sexually assaulted, according to the complaint.

That Sunday morning, she persuaded him to let her go out to get food from the cafeteria. But she went to the university security office and told them she was being mistreated. They notified police, and officers noticed marks on her neck, according to the complaint.

The Associated Press