A 19-year-old man is accused of holding his girlfriend captive in her dorm room at a university in Minnesota while he raped, beat and waterboarded her for days until she escaped.
Keanu Labatte was arrested Sunday at St. Catherine University, an all-female school in St. Paul. He is charged with five felony counts: three for criminal sexual conduct, one for domestic assault by strangulation and one for threats of violence.
According to a criminal complaint filed this week, Labatte arrived on campus last Thursday to visit his girlfriend of two months. She is not named in the complaint.
On Sunday morning, she convinced him to let her leave to get food from the cafeteria. That’s when she went to the university’s security office and told them she was being abused. They notified police, and police noted black, blue and red marks on her neck, the complaint says.
Police found Labatte in the dorm room, the complaint says, and arrested him on probable cause of domestic assault and sexual assault.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Labatte was still in custody.
Hunter Biden was indicted Thursday on federal firearms charges, the latest step in a long-running investigation into the president’s son that puts the case on track toward a possible high-stakes trial as the 2024 election looms.
Biden is accused of lying about his drug use when he bought a firearm in October 2018, a period when he has acknowledged struggling with addiction to crack cocaine, according to the indictment filed in federal court in Delaware by a special council overseeing the case.
The indictment comes weeks after the collapse of a plea deal that would have averted a criminal trial and distracting headlines for President Joe Biden.
Hunter Biden’s defense attorney argues he didn’t violate the law and remains protected by an immunity provision that was part of the plea deal. The charges, meanwhile, are rarely filed as stand-alone counts and a federal appeals court recently found the measure he was charged under unconstitutional.
Libyan authorities limited access to an inundated city Friday to allow searchers to dig through mud and hollowed-out buildings for 10,000 people missing and feared dead in flooding that has already killed more than 11,000.
Authorities warned that disease and explosives shifted by the waters could claim yet more lives. In the most affected areas, efforts to recover the dead and distribute aid were plagued by confusion and lack of resources. Libya’s two opposing governments, long divided by civil strife and war, have struggled to respond to the disaster of such great proportions.
The disaster has brought some rare unity across oil-rich Libya, which has been split since 2014 between governments in the east and west backed by various militia forces and international patrons. But relief has been slowed by the destruction after several bridges that connect Derna were destroyed and distribution of aid has been patchy.
Sumaii Gemechu can be reached at geme9653@stthomas.edu.