(NewsReady.com) – A 17-year-old has confessed to murdering a popular hockey coach in May. The teen was robbing the father of two’s car when the victim challenged them. Now, it turns out the perpetrator already had a history of violent crime.
On the morning of May 6, Michael Brasel, a 44-year-old youth hockey coach from St Paul, Minnesota, realized someone was trying to break into his wife’s car. Outside, he found 18-year-old Ta Mla in the process of robbing the car. Brasel called out, “What are you doing?” — then Kle Swee, who was acting as lookout while Mla committed the theft, fired around half a dozen shots at him. A neighbor dialed 911, and police were quickly on the scene, but Brasel died on the way to hospital.
Authorities arrested Swee after the vehicle the thieves had used to travel to the scene of the crime was identified from home surveillance camera footage, and a license plate check came up with his name. Days later, cops tracked down Mla by reconstructing Swee’s movements and checking records of a scooter rental he’d made.
Both perpetrators have previous criminal records. Mla was arrested twice for juvenile gun possession; he’s now been charged as a codefendant in Brasel’s murder. Meanwhile, Swee pleaded guilty to felony aggravated robbery in April 2022 after he robbed a fellow student at Harding High School. That crime was also caught on surveillance cameras. Unfortunately, despite having threatened his victim with a replica gun during the crime, Swee was only sentenced to probation and received no jail time. This time around, he’s been charged with second-degree murder, and prosecutors are pushing to have him tried as an adult. That would mean he faces up to 25.5 years in jail. If he’d been given a proper sentence for his first offense, instead of a meaningless slap on the wrist, Michael Brasel might be alive today.
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