An Eagan man has been charged with choking a woman and a man last weekend at a motel in Mendota Heights.
Bernard Edward Stone, 46, is charged with one felony count of domestic assault by strangulation, which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
He is also charged with two misdemeanor counts of domestic assault and two misdemeanor counts of fifth-degree assault, each of which has a maximum penalty of 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Stone remains in the Dakota County Jail on a $60,000 bond. He is also being held on an outstanding DWI warrant from Anoka County and another warrant from Ashland County, Wis. An omnibus hearing in his local case is scheduled July 31 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.
According to the criminal complaint, Eagan police were alerted to an assault in progress July 7 at a motel in the 2100 block of Highway 13 in Mendota. During the 911 call, dispatchers could hear a woman screaming, “Stop it!”
As police arrived, they heard a woman in the room yelling, “Get the [expletive] off me, leave me alone, stop it!” Officers knocked, and a man answered the door; police saw another man, later identified as Stone, standing in the middle of the room, with the woman on a bed in the back corner.
The woman told police that she was asleep in a bed with Stone when he began to pull on her and grab her, squeezing her hips and arms. He got up to go to the bathroom, and when he returned to bed, he began to assault the woman, then strangled her, she said.
The woman said that after she called 911, Stone threw her to the floor, where she hit her head and shoulder. She said Stone then climbed on top of her and strangled here again.
Stone then turned to the other man, who was asleep in a different bed, and began strangling him as well, according to the complaint.
The woman told police that Stone had been drinking all day, and that she had seen him drinking whiskey earlier that evening in St. Paul.
