A St. Paul man has pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge while remaining under suspicion of trying to force an Ohio State University student to pay him not to post nude images from her stolen laptop on the Internet.
Demonte J. Latimore, 24, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in St. Paul to being a felon in possession of a firearm. Latimore, a six-time felon, has convictions for burglaries and car thefts. He now faces a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.
St. Paul police were looking for Latimore in February in connection with numerous armed robberies. But it was a stolen Toyota that led authorities to him.
Police found the missing vehicle March 8 and watched Latimore take photos of it with a cellphone, then enter a library at Metropolitan State University, according Ramsey County court records. Police arrested him there and found a semiautomatic pistol in his pocket.
Still pending is the investigation into the extortion attempt tied to a laptop stolen from a college sophomore in Newark, Ohio, in December.
Two weeks after the theft, the student began receiving e-mails demanding hundreds of dollars to prevent the posting of her photos online.
According to the FBI's Cyber Crime Task Force in Minneapolis, the e-mails were traced to a St. Paul address.
Someone apparently hacked into a folder on the laptop and found nude photos of the woman, along with videos of her having sex with her boyfriend, according to a sworn statement filed by FBI special agent Robert Blackmore.
