St. Cloud man sentenced to 27½ years for rape at southside park

ST. CLOUD - A Stearns County judge sentenced 24-year-old Mohamed H. Abdi to 27½ years in prison for his role in an October 2020 rape.

Abdi is the third St. Cloud man sentenced for the crime, in which the three men took a woman from downtown St. Cloud to a park and assaulted her.

The men — Abdi, 23-year-old Abdirahin O. Ali and 26-year-old Sahal A. Hassan — were charged in late 2020 with felony counts related to criminal sexual conduct.

In December, Stearns County Judge Kris Davick-Halfen found Abdi guilty of four felony counts related to kidnapping and criminal sexual conduct following a two-day bench trial.

On Wednesday, Davick-Halfen committed Abdi to prison for 330 months, which is an upward departure from sentencing guidelines based on multiple aggravating factors, including threats to kill the woman, according to the Stearns County Attorney's Office. Abdi also must register as a predatory offender.

A jury convicted Ali on four felony counts in October; he was sentenced to 30 years in prison in December.

Hassan pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting first-degree criminal sexual conduct as part of a plea agreement last February; he was sentenced to 15 years in prison in April.

According to criminal complaints against the men, a woman reported she was raped at a park in the early morning hours of Oct. 18, 2020. The woman told police after she left a downtown St. Cloud bar the night before, she remembers being in a car with multiple men who threatened to hurt her if she didn't do as they said.

The woman said she was thrown onto a playground slide and raped while the other men encouraged the assault. She was then forced to perform oral sex on one of the men before she was able to escape.

During the sexual-assault exam at the hospital, it was noted the woman's clothing was ripped and wood chips fell out of her pants, documents state.

A bouncer at the downtown bar gave police a description of a vehicle seen outside the bar when the woman left. Police found a vehicle matching the description on a surveillance video at a nearby gas station. The car was registered to Ali and the footage showed the three men leaving the gas station that night.

Traces of DNA from the woman's rape kit matched Ali and Hassan, and found Abdi's DNA could not be excluded from the sample while 99.99% of the population could be excluded from the sample, court documents state.