Rochester man charged with killing of pregnant woman, toddler, pleads guilty
Jul. 16—Just feet away from the man who admitted to killing them, the smiling faces of Keona Sade Foote, 23, and her daughter, 2-year-old Miyona Zayla Lee-Miller, looked up at Foote's mother from a larger-than-life-sized photo.
On Thursday, 30-year-old Renard Carter pleaded guilty in Olmsted County District Court to second-degree murder, second-degree murder with intent, and second-degree murder of an unborn child.
Foote and Miyona were found dead on Sept. 13, 2020, in their home at Olympik Village Apartments, at 402 31st St. NE in Rochester.
Carter testified Thursday that on Sept. 10, he forced Foote to put her hands around Miyona's neck and then placed his hands over hers and applied pressure until the toddler died. He said he then forced Foote to place a phone charging cord around her own neck and tighten it before he himself tightened it further.
Multiple videos of the killings were recorded by Carter and posted to social media.
"I took a shower. She was still breathing, and I left," he said of leaving Foote to die in the apartment. "I knew she wasn't going to wake up."
Before Carter killed Foote, who was in her first trimester of pregnancy, he said she had confronted him about his infidelity. Carter claimed in court that Foote made a remark about their unborn child and attempted to physically harm him.
"That's when I lost it," he said. "I blacked out."
At one point in the hearing, Foote's mother, Brandy Williams, left the courtroom sobbing. She watched the remainder of the hearing from a conference room via the Zoom hearing, which allowed others to attend remotely.
A sentencing date was not set at Thursday's hearing. Carter's $5 million unconditional bail was revoked, and he is being held without bail until the sentencing hearing.
A sentencing recommendation was presented to the court that would see Carter serve three consecutive sentences of 426 months, 326 months and 326 months. Combined, the sentences add up to just shy of 90 years.
In Minnesota, two-thirds of a state prison sentence is served in prison, and the remaining third, assuming a person incurs no additional time while serving their sentence, is served on supervised release. If Judge Lisa Hayne follows the recommendation, Carter would spend nearly 60 years in state prison.
To be charged with first-degree murder in Minnesota, a grand jury must indict the person. A conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. As a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, grand juries across the state had been unable to meet for months.
Olmsted County Attorney Mark Ostrem said his office was going to present the case to a grand jury Thursday for an indictment. Ostrem said his office was approached by Carter and his defense attorneys about a plea deal.
"It's really difficult to ever come up with an appropriate or satisfying disposition in this case," Ostrem said, adding that it was important that the sentences represent all three victims. "If we were to have a life sentence, even though we could have gotten perhaps consecutive life sentences, we all know that a person can only live one life, so only one of those sentences would have been served, and so in some fashion, the other two victims would have not completely been accounted for in the actual sanction, and so we felt like we are getting a representative sentence for all three victims. They're all been accounted for in this, and we are accomplishing what we had set out to accomplish to begin with."
Rochester Police Capt. Casey Moilanen said in a statement that Foote's family, the community and the Rochester Police Department "will never forget the tragic murders of Miyona Miller, Keona Foote and her unborn child at the hands of Renard Carter."
"There is no amount of prison time that will erase the pain Carter has caused," Moilanen said in the statement. "We hope that today's plea is a step forward in the healing process."
Carter was arrested on Sept. 12 in South Carolina after police said he went there with plans to kill a former girlfriend. He was shot by law enforcement officers as they arrested him.
Police believed he had a gun, but it was later determined that it was a BB gun. He was briefly hospitalized for his injuries before he was returned to Rochester. The complaint also says he told medical workers that he wanted to be killed by police.
Carter was released from prison on April 22, 2020, after serving a sentence for felony domestic assault, the criminal complaint states.
Weeks after her daughter and granddaughter's death, Williams told the Post Bulletin that Miyona was the joy of her daughter's life and that Foote did whatever she could as a mother to protect Miyona.
Foote and her daughter moved to Rochester on Sept. 1, and Foote enrolled in school before moving to Rochester with dreams of becoming an EMT. Williams said her daughter started classes to become a nursing assistant.
"They were angels, given to me for a little while," Williams said in September. "I know and I believe 100% they are in heaven now. I take comfort and peace in knowing that."
