A 30-year-old repeat felon who broke into a random home in Inver Grove Heights and slit a woman’s throat with a box cutter and assaulted her teenage son has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Calling the July 2019 attack “shocking, terrorizing and depraved in a way that I could never imagine,” Dakota County District Court Judge Tracy Perzel on Monday gave Semaji Jamal Clemons the maximum sentence allowed under a plea agreement he reached with prosecutors this past April.
Under the agreement, Clemons, of Inver Grove Heights, could have been given between 183 and 240 months for pleading guilty to second-degree attempted murder (with intent) and first-degree burglary. A first-degree assault charge was dismissed.
Assistant Dakota County Attorney Cassandra Shepherd read a victim impact statement by mother Michelle Stinnett, who said she feels grateful to be alive and that the attack “has caused indescribable anguish and will affect me and my family for the rest of our lives.”
Despite knowing that Clemons is behind bars, Stinnett said she fears for her and her son’s safety and is “haunted by the thought that he may be released someday to assault my family again.” She asked for the maximum sentence.
After the impact statement was read, Clemons’ court-appointed attorney, Jennifer Rose Congdon, told Perzel that he had decided not to have Congdon argue for a lesser sentence and wanted the court to give him 20 years.
Perzel obliged, but before doing so said that even if Clemons had not requested the maximum sentence she would have given it to him anyway “based upon the extraordinarily depraved and terrorizing nature of this crime, as well as the grave risk that, in my opinion, you pose to public safety.”
Clemons has a significant criminal history in Minnesota, according to court records. He was convicted of first-degree aggravated robbery in 2010 and 2012 and of terroristic threats in 2014 and 2017.
At the time of the attack in Inver Grove Heights, Clemons was on “intensive supervised release” with Dakota County Community Corrections for a second-degree burglary conviction out of Washington County in March 2017. He had been given 45 months in prison, but was released in March 2019.
Clemons absconded from the supervision on June 6, 2019, court records show. Five days later, he was arrested by the Washington County sheriff’s office, and he was transferred to the Dakota County sheriff’s office. After a restructure of release terms by Dakota County Community Corrections, Clemons was released from the county jail on “intensive supervised release” on June 20, about a month before the attack in Inver Grove Heights.
Brian Kopperud, the county’s director of community corrections, declined to comment on the case Monday.
‘BE READY TO DIE’
Neither the woman nor her son had ever met Clemons before the attack.
The criminal charges give the following account:
Clemons broke into the home around 3 p.m. July 19 and immediately went into the boy’s room and told him it was “time to die.” He grabbed the 13-year-old from behind and took him into another room, where the boy’s mother was, and repeated “it’s time to die.” He punched her in the face.
When the boy tried to protect his mother, Clemons — listed in court records as being 5 feet, 10 inches tall and 215 pounds — punched the boy in the head and face. The boy managed to escape and run to a neighbor, who called 911.
The boy returned with a box cutter and tried to help his mother. Clemons took the box cutter away and as the boy tried to stop him, stabbed the woman in the back. He sat on the woman, told the boy to look away, and then cut her throat.
During the assault, Clemons told her several times that she was going to die, saying “be ready to die,” and “you’re going to die” and “you’re dying.”
When officers arrived, they saw blood on the floor and heard the woman in a back bedroom crying for help. Clemons walked out of the bedroom with blood on his pants and shoes.
Officers found the woman covered in blood with puncture wounds to her back and a deep cut to her throat. She received 10 stitches to her throat.
‘NOTHING BUT PURE EVIL’
Stinnett said in her impact statement that she and her son “fought so hard as we faced a man so full of evil, so full of nothing but pure evil.”
She said she forever will be haunted by the moment that Clemons “calmly looked at my son” and asked him to look away before sliding the box cutter across the front of her neck.
“In that moment I found myself wondering — how can a stranger, a person I don’t know, do this to me?” she said. “How is this happening?”
She said she will continue to “live and attempt to be happy” and that “we can only hope that he will not be allowed to harm us again. I will continue to work on my recovery while trying to keep my attacker from affecting my life more than he already has.”
Before Perzel handed down the sentence, she allowed Clemons to speak. Clemons, who stood with his arms behind his back and crossed for most of the hearing, apologized to the victim, saying that “I wish I could go back and take it back. I’m sorry.”
With good behavior, Clemons could be released from prison after 13 years and 4 months, with the remaining term on supervised release.
Court records show that on Feb. 25 Clemons was charged with fifth-degree assault and disorderly conduct after he allegedly assaulted an inmate at Dakota County jail.
Perzel said the randomness of the attack on the mother and her son was consistent with his prior crimes.
“It was callously indifferent to human life,” she said. “It invaded not only the zone of privacy, which was the victim’s home, but it invaded that relationship with the victim with her child.”
If not for the “child’s bravery,” she said, “the circumstances could be markedly different here today. … I can’t imagine what that family went through that day and cannot imagine what they continue to go through. And I hope for them an ability to someday be able to move forward in a positive way, despite these really awful terrorizing events.”