Inset photos: Antoine Suggs, top left, Darren Lee McWright, top right; Bottom row, from left: Nitosha Lee Flug-Presley, Loyace Foreman III, Matthew Pettus and Jasmine Sturm (Insets and crime scene screenshots from NBC Minneapolis affiliate KARE 11; Pettus photo from his obituary; McWright photo from Associated Press)
A man was sentenced Monday to 103 years in state prison for the fatal shootings of four people found inside a Mercedes Benz SUV abandoned in a cornfield.
Antoine Suggs, 40, was sentenced on Monday in the deaths of Jasmine Sturm, 30; her brother, Matthew Pettus, 26; her boyfriend, Loyace Foreman III, 35; and her friend, Nitosha Flug-Presley, 30. Their bodies were found in an SUV and abandoned in a Wisconsin cornfield about 65 miles east of St. Paul, Minnesota on Sept. 12, 2021. He was convicted of four second-degree murder counts in April.
In court, the victims’ families spoke out about their loss, according to NBC Minneapolis affiliate KARE 11, which covered the hearing.
“Lives were taken, many of them, and Mr. Suggs still has his life,” said Foreman’s father.
Angela Sturm, the mother of Sturm and Pettus, said she couldn’t fill the “gaping hole” in her life.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t cry,” Sturm said. “Being alone with my thoughts is very hard. I miss their voices. I have this irrational fear that I am going to forget what they look and sound like.”
Before he was sentenced, Suggs said he was the victim, claimed the four were trying to rob him, and he was defending himself.
“I had no beef, no quarrel, no animosity with any one of them,” Suggs said. “Their actions were the cause of their untimely demise.”
Judge JaPaul Harris told the victims’ families they were “never going to get an answer as to why Mr. Suggs did what he did.”
“Each one of these individuals …. deserves that you serve time for each one of them,” Harris said, addressing Suggs. “You cast blame on others, and this a sentence you now have to take responsibility for.”
A criminal complaint obtained by Law&Crime said it all went down after a night of drinking in St. Paul.
“An employee at the White Squirrel, located at 974 Seventh Street West in St. Paul, told police that [Sturm] and [Pettus] came into the bar sometime after 1:00 AM on Sunday morning,” the complaint states. “The employee said a photo of [Flug-Presley] looked like the woman who was in the bar with [Sturm]. The employee said [Flug-Presley] was with a man the witness argued with. The man said something about having six children and this happening every time he comes back to Minnesota. The employee picked Suggs out of a photo line-up as the man she argued with in the bar.”
Citing surveillance footage and phone data, investigators indicate that Suggs killed the victims around Seventh Street in St. Paul between 3:30 a.m. and 3:48 a.m. on Sept. 12.
Video showed Flug-Presley slumped over in the front passenger seat of the SUV with her head pointed toward her feet, authorities said.
Suggs told his father he shot and killed them in the SUV after he “snapped.”
The complaint said that Suggs’ father, Darren Lee McWright, who also uses the last name Osborne, gave his son a ride to Minnesota from Wisconsin after they left the Mercedes-Benz SUV in a cornfield. Suggs’ father denied knowing the bodies of the people his son shot were in the vehicle they abandoned, the document said.
McWright was arrested, ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts of hiding a corpse, and was sentenced in December 2022 to five years in prison.
Suggs surrendered in Arizona, where he lived.
Law&Crime’s Alberto Luperon contributed to this report.
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