Eagan Woman Arrested on Charges of Threatening Boyfriend with Machete

An Eagan woman has been arrested on charges that she threatened her ex-boyfriend with a kitchen knife and a 22-inch machete when he came to her home to pick up his clothes last year.

Keanna Renee Kazee Clerk, 28, faces a felony charge of making terroristic threats, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

A warrant for Clerk’s arrest was issued Sept. 26 when she failed to appear at a hearing. She was arrested Wednesday in Minneapolis and remained in the Dakota County Jail Thursday on a $2,500 bond. An omnibus hearing in her case is scheduled Oct. 31 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.

According to the criminal complaint, Eagan police were called to Clerk’s home on Nov. 5, 2010, after she reported that her boyfriend had pulled a knife on her.

When police arrived, they found a man with his car backed into a handicapped parking spot with the trunk popped open. The man matched Clerk’s description of the man who assaulted her, and police took him into custody.

As officers were talking to the man, Clerk walked toward them holding a machete and a knife, screaming that those were the weapons with which the man had threatened her.

Clerk told police that she was pregnant with the man’s child, and they had argued the previous evening when he didn’t come home and didn’t answer calls or text messages. She said she sent him a message that their relationship was over and that he was no longer welcome at her home, but that he had come to her apartment, where he loudly banged on the door and swore at her.

Clerk said she opened the door, but when she wouldn’t let him in, he backed up and pulled a large machete from his pants, so she grabbed a kitchen knife. She told police that she was able to get the machete away from the man and flee the apartment.

Clerk subsequently told police that the man had knocked on her door, but stopped, so she thought he had left the area. She said she told her son to run out the back door to a friend’s house, and she grabbed a kitchen knife for protection, then opened the door.

Clerk said the man then pushed his way inside, pulled the machete from his pants and held it high over his head in a threatening manner, at which point she fled.

The man told police that he had lived with Clerk for about a year, and was the father of her unborn child. He said they had argued the previous day and he left, telling her he would return the next day to collect his clothes.

He said he backed into the handicapped parking spot and opened the trunk, then knocked several times on Clerk’s door. He said she wouldn’t let him in, and told him if he came in, she would “cut him.”

The man told police that he used to keep a machete in his car, but he recently got his driver’s license back and had taken the machete out of his car because he didn’t want to get in trouble. He said he had put the machete in the laundry closet in Clerk’s apartment so it would be “out of sight of the children.”

When Clerk finally opened the door, the man told police, she had the machete in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other, but he came in because he needed to get his clothes and that “he was not afraid of the defendant as he was twice her size.”

Inside the apartment, Clerk repeatedly pushed the man, getting more and more angry as he collected his belongings, he told police. He said she threatened to call the police and tell them he had threatened her with the machete.

Police did not find a machete sheath on the man, and “observed that the machete taken into custody was extremely sharp, so that if [the man] had had the machete in his pants, he would have cut himself,” according to the complaint.