A 39-year-old man received a sentence Monday that assures he will most likely spend the rest of his life in prison for murdering four people in St. Paul and then hiding their bodies in a western Wisconsin farm field.

Antoine Suggs of Scottsdale, Ariz., was sentenced in Ramsey County District Court to a term of more than 103 years. Six weeks ago, a jury convicted him on four counts of second-degree murder in connection with the shooting of two women and two men in September 2021.

With credit for time in jail since his arrest a few days after the killings, Suggs' sentence calls for the first 68 years to be served in prison and the balance on supervised release.

On March 31, jurors needed one afternoon's worth of deliberations before coming back with their guilty verdicts, one for each victim: Nitosha Flug-Presley, 30, of Stillwater; Jasmine C. Sturm, 30; Matthew Pettus, 26; and Loyace Foreman III, 35, all of St. Paul.

In testimony one day before the jury got the case, Suggs admitted to the shootings but said he was acting in self-defense after the four attempted to rob him. Suggs said he shot the four, adding he thought Pettus or Foreman might be armed.

"I had no beef, no quarrel or animosity with any one of them," Suggs said to the court from his written comments moments before Judge JaPaul Harris pronounced the sentence. "Your honor, I stand here today as a victim of others' greed and a victim of a wrongful conviction."

Harris said he read statements of support for Suggs and was struggling to rectify descriptions of him as a loving father with him killing four people and leaving them in a field hoping they would never be found.

Angela Sturm, the mother of Sturm and Pettus, said in court that "I lost two children to a horrific way. I'm no longer able to tell if I am angry, depressed or if I just have an indifference to this gaping hole in my life."

On a live video hookup, Foreman's mother, Jessica Foreman, said Suggs "took my son, he left my grandchildren without a father. He left his sisters without a brother, and his nieces and nephews without an uncle."

Antoine Suggs
Ramsey County jail
Antoine Suggs

Prosecutors argued that Suggs meant to kill Flug-Presley, Sturm, Pettus and Foreman when he shot them after a night of drinking on W. 7th Street. They said Suggs shot them just after 3:30 a.m. and verified they were dead before calling his father, Darren Osborne.

Footage from traffic cameras, gas station security and a Dunn County, Wis., sheriff's squad showed Suggs in a Mercedes SUV and Osborne in a Nissan Rogue traveling in tandem. The pair left the bodies in the Mercedes in a cornfield 60 miles from the scene of the shootings. Police found six spent shell casings in the abandoned vehicle.

Osborne pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison for helping hide the bodies.

Staff writer Kyeland Jackson contributed to this report.