Man agrees to plead guilty to targeting woman’s St. Paul home at random and raping her at gunpoint

A repeat felon admitted Wednesday to breaking into a St. Paul home he targeted for burglary in the middle of the night and raping a woman at gunpoint.

Deonte Marquon Thomas, 34, of Maplewood, agreed to plead guilty in Ramsey County District Court to first-degree criminal sexual conduct and first-degree burglary in connection with the break-in and sexual assault on April 15 shortly after 4 a.m. in the 300 block of S. Snelling Avenue.

The agreement calls for Thomas to be sentenced to a term of slightly more than 20 years. With credit for time in jail since his arrest, Thomas is expected to serve the roughly 13¼ years in prison and the balance on supervised release. Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 3.

The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office said the sentence “represents the most time in prison that Thomas could be sentenced to pursuant to the Minnesota sentencing guidelines.”

Thomas’ criminal history in Minnesota also includes convictions for theft, receiving stolen property, domestic abuse and illegal weapons possession.

According to the charges:

Officers arrived at the home in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood and found the woman sitting on her front steps. She said her attacker had run off about 10 minutes earlier. Police launched a search using dogs and drones.

The woman said she was sleeping when she heard pounding on one side of her residence, then saw a man break the door and enter. She said Thomas demanded money and took cash from her purse before he raped her at gunpoint and choked her. She yelled for her neighbors until she passed out.

At one point, she bit Thomas on the arm “as hard as she could” during a brief struggle for the gun, the complaint read.

Exterior surveillance video showed a pickup truck in the alley near the woman’s house around the time of the break-in with the license plate visible. A police check showed the pickup was registered to Thomas. A still image from a second security video of a man walking on the woman’s property was shown to her by police, and she identified him as her attacker.

After his arrest, Thomas said he was “driving around in the early morning hours … and randomly selected a house to break into,” the charges read. He said he used a rock or a brick to break the window on the door, reached in and unlocked the door. He admitted robbing and raping the woman but denied choking her.