A Ramsey County jury found a Minnesota man guilty Friday night of shooting and killing four passengers in his Mercedes Benz and dumping the vehicle with their bodies 65 miles away in a Wisconsin cornfield in September 2021.
The jury found Antoine Suggs guilty of four counts of second-degree murder — intentional but not pre-meditated — and not guilty of four counts of second-degree unintentional murder while committing felony assault. He faces up to 40 years in prison on each guilty count and will be sentenced May 15.
After the verdict was read and the jury excused, deputies escorted people who had been in the courtroom in support of Suggs out first, asking supporters of the victims to remain. When the court doors closed, the friends and family of the four victims burst into applause, cheers, screams and loud weeping.
Damone Presley, the father of Nitosha Lee Flug-Presley, who was one of the victims, led the group in a prayer and asked them not to heckle Suggs’ supporters and family, but instead to “rejoice in spirit.”
“We got justice!” he said. “I want to say that today was a great day! … We have to live with this for the rest of our lives, but today we got justice.”
In an interview later, Presley acted as a spokesperson for the other families and said that a weight had been lifted from the shoulders of all the family members.
He said he felt hopeful and that the verdict that represented justice for the victims “reminded me of my daughter’s smile and her always telling me ‘I was your first. I am your baby, and Daddy, I get my way.’ And today there was that promise that she got justice.”
Suggs, who took the witness stand in his own defense Thursday, did not deny killing each of his passengers — 30-year-old Jasmine Christine Sturm, her brother, 26-year-old Matthew Isiah Pettus, 35-year-old Sturm’s boyfriend, Loyace Foreman III and Sturm’s lifelong friend, 30-year-old Nitosha Lee Flug-Presley — whom he had just met hours earlier.
He maintained, however, he acted in self-defense after the woman in the passenger seat next to him allegedly drew a gun while her friends used coded language to plot his robbery. He said he sustained several punches to the back of his head.
Presley said it was difficult to sit through Suggs’ “made-up story” about why he killed the four and called Suggs “heinous,” “treacherous” and “an animal.”
He said he knew his daughter and his friends and they were good people and there was no way they had plans to attack Suggs.
“They got in the wrong car with the wrong person with the vision that they were going to have a good time,” he said.
He said his daughter was “good friends with everybody, a caring and loving person, a beautiful mother” and that she will always be his “baby.”
In closing arguments earlier that day, Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Colin Haley called that version of events improbable, given that by his own admission Suggs snatched the gun from Flug-Presley’s lap as she was rifling through her purse, shot her three friends in the backseat and then shot Flug-Presley last.
“(It) doesn’t make sense,” Haley told the jurors. “If she was the one who initially had the gun … why would you kill her last? Consider the fact that she’s sitting right next to you. … She was unarmed. Why kill her?”
Haley said the prosecution was not required to prove motive. Otherwise, said Haley, “he has admitted to virtually every element of the charged offenses.”
Filling the courtroom to capacity, friends and family of the four victims gasped and cried quietly Friday as Haley presented graphic photos on an overhead screen showing that all the victims had been shot in the face at close range. A medical examiner testified at trial that the two men were still alive after their initial wounds. Forensics showed subsequent shots to the head.
Two of the victims could be seen in crime photos with their hands in their laps, which Haley said undermined any claim of self-defense or robbery. “Does that look like an aggressive posture to you?” he said.
Security video from a Holiday gas station at Snelling and Marshall avenues hours after the killings shows Suggs driving up to the gas pump with Flug-Presley’s body folded forward in front of the glove compartment. Suggs can be seen on video making a cellphone call to his father, Darren Lee Osborne, while he walks into the store and orders $50 of diesel gas and blunt-style cigars.
“Is that the look of a man who is so panicked and overwhelmed at the experience of being robbed in a car?” Haley said.
The two men later drove to western Wisconsin, where Suggs abandoned his SUV and received a ride back to St. Paul from his father. Osborne, who later acknowledged his role in the crime, was convicted last year of aiding an offender by being an accomplice after the fact and sentenced in December to a nearly five-year prison term.
Suggs’ attorney, Kevin DeVore, urged jurors to block out the horror of the shootings, as well as details that would not have been evident in the moment — such as the fact that none of the victims were armed — and put themselves in Suggs’ shoes. “Cancel the background noise,” DeVore said. Suggs “used the same weapon that was attempted to be used against him to end the same threat.”
“If you’re going to kill four people, why would you do it while you’re driving? Did he believe his actions were necessary to avert great bodily harm, or death? Absolutely, given the circumstances,” DeVore added. “(Would you ask) ‘Does anybody else here have a gun?’ Well no, of course not, he’s not going to ask them if they had a gun.”
In a brief interview following closing arguments, Suggs’ cousin, Rasheeda Suggs, said she believed her cousin’s testimony. She said he was the father of six children. “I lived in Arizona when he lived in Arizona,” she said. “He never did anything like this.”
After the verdict was read, Presley praised and thanked the jury and the dozens of people who had worked on the homicide case and said that the full impact of the verdict would probably hit harder later Friday night but at that moment he was “ecstatic.”
“But still,” Presley said, “tomorrow when I wake up, my daughter and her friends are not here.”
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