A 59-year-old man charged in January with raping a 71-year-old St. Paul woman he met on Facebook is now accused of committing a 2013 sexual assault at a Maplewood motel.
Thao Xiong’s DNA came back as a match through an initiative to analyze a backlog of untested sexual assault kits, according to a Ramsey County District Court criminal complaint charging him Friday by warrant with felony first-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Thao Xiong, shown in January 2025 (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)
Xiong remained out of custody on Monday. He was released from jail on March 21 after posting a $50,000 bond in the January case that also charges him with first-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Xiong allegedly committed that offense while on probation for a 2020 first-degree criminal sexual conduct conviction involving a 41-year-old woman during a night of drinking at his St. Paul apartment in July 2019.
According to the Friday’s criminal complaint:
A woman reported to police on July 15, 2013, that she had just been forcibly sexually assaulted at a motel off U.S. 61 in Maplewood by a man she knew as “Chue Lee,” identified in November 2020 through a DNA match as Xiong.
The woman said she had been talking with “Chue” for two days over the phone, that she did not know him previously and had assumed he got her number from someone she knew.
She said he called her on July 15 and said he was coming to Minnesota from Wisconsin and wanted her to show him around. They also planned to go for a walk by a lake.
She met Xiong in the parking lot of a St. Paul grocery store, where he suggested they take one car and offered to drive. She agreed and got into his car. He drove past the lake, telling her they were going to get something to eat first. Rather than going to a restaurant, he brought her to the motel, saying he wanted to get some rest before eating.
Xiong rented the room and once inside began “ripping her clothes apart,” the complaint says. She said he “overpowered” her and raped her.
She went to a hospital for a sexual assault examination the same day. A nurse examiner noted bruising to the woman’s body and she complained about areas where she said Xiong had bitten her.
She told the nurse the assault began immediately after they got into the motel room and Xiong locked the door. After the assault, she said, Xiong appeared scared, so she got in his car. Xiong dropped her off and about 15 minutes later he called her and left a “cruel message,” which she later provided to police.
The complaint says motel video shows Xiong arriving with the woman in a gray Toyota Prius just after 5 p.m. He went into the motel office and then moved the car in front of a room. The two entered the room at 5:15 p.m. and left 45 minutes later.
An investigator in late July 2020 discovered the sexual assault kit, which had not been tested. It was brought to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and four months later an unidentified male DNA profile taken from swabs of the woman was entered into the state’s DNA databases and the National DNA Index System.
The BCA notified St. Paul police on Nov. 4, 2020, that Xiong’s DNA, obtained from his 2019 sexual assault case, matched the DNA in the 2013 assault. Police tried to contact the woman but were unsuccessful, the complaint says.
Last March, police were told DNA collected from Xiong in the January case matched the DNA found on the swabs taken from the 2013 victim, the complaint says.
Police tried to locate the woman and reached her on April 10 after her son called to ask why they were trying to contact his mother who does not speak English, the complaint says. She told police through an interpreter she “had been waiting for a very long time for an update on her case and wants him prosecuted for sexually assaulting her,” the complaint says.
Police sent the case to the attorney’s office for charging consideration last month.
Kate Courtney, Xiong’s attorney in the January case, said Monday she could not comment on Friday’s charge because she has been out of town and has not read the complaint.
Previous charges
According to January’s complaint, St. Paul police were dispatched to the 71-year-old woman’s apartment in the Summit-University neighborhood about 6:30 p.m. Jan. 28 after she reported she had just been forcefully sexually assaulted by a man, who was later identified as Xiong.
She told police someone must have given Xiong her phone number because he called, asking to meet. She agreed, and invited him over. When he entered the apartment, she told police, he pushed her into her bedroom, took off her clothes and raped her.
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She gave police a Facebook profile that Xiong used to contact her. As an officer pulled up the profile, she immediately said, “that’s him,” the complaint states. He was arrested Jan. 28 after police obtained a search warrant for his apartment in St. Paul’s Payne-Phalen neighborhood and found him hiding under his bed.
Court records show that Xiong reached a plea deal with prosecutors in the 2019 case and admitted to fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct in exchange for a first-degree charge being dismissed. He was sentenced to 231 days in jail, which was time that he had already served after his arrest, and put on supervised probation for 10 years.
Xiong has no other convictions, besides two petty misdemeanor traffic violations.
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