Iowan enters plea in fatal attack on grandmother
A Des Moines man accused of attacking and killing his elderly grandmother will be sent to prison following a morning plea hearing.
Noah John LaPrei entered an Alford plea Wednesday to second-degree murder in the death of his grandmother, Rachel Pray, who was his legal guardian when he assaulted her in the northeast Des Moines home they shared on Oct. 10, 2015. The plea means that LaPrei, now 19, conceded that there was enough evidence to find him guilty of the charge had the case gone to trial.
LaPrei is set to be sentenced at a hearing on June 1, court records show. He will be required to serve a prison sentence, but a plea agreement allows both prosecutors and defense attorneys to present arguments about what the length of the sentence should be and whether any mandatory minimum sentence applies, according to an order from a judge.
A second-degree murder conviction under Iowa law carries a 50-year prison sentence with a 35-year mandatory minimum before a defendant becomes eligible for parole. Polk County Attorney John Sarcone declined to speak Wednesday about what sentence prosecutors will recommend at the hearing.
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Pray, 79, had been the legal guardian to her teenage grandson since his mother was hit by a car and killed in October 2011. LaPrei was a 17-year-old senior at Southeast Polk High School at the time of the killing, which shocked friends and family members who described him as a kind and polite teenager.
On the night of her death, Pray called her son, Joe Pray, around 11 p.m. to tell him that her grandson had attacked her. Police ultimately found LaPrei at a nearby Git-N-Go convenience store, where he had broken a window and was acting "erratically," police said. Two officers heard LaPrei say, "I beat her good" after taking him into custody at the store, according to a search warrant application filed in the case.
LaPrei was initially charged with first-degree murder and was scheduled to go on trial on May 1, and a filing by his defense attorneys show they planned to argue that LaPrei was intoxicated at the time of the killing. In an interview with The Des Moines Register after the killing, Joe Pray said that he immediately thought his nephew was under the influence of drugs when he arrived at his mother's house on the night of the attack.
Pray said at the time that family members hoped the teenager would not spend the rest of his life in prison.
"I know her first words in Heaven were, 'Please, God, protect Noah,'" he said of his mother.