LOA— Brent Brown, the man alleged to have kidnapped and raped a Snow College student Madelyn Allen in mid-December 2021, pleaded guilty to five first-degree and two second-degree felonies during an arraignment last Tuesday, May 3 in Loa.
Brown is facing six criminal counts, including rape, object rape aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault, all first degree felonies; and aggravated assault and obstructing justice, which are second degree felonies.
Brown’s pleas were accepted by the court, and he was bound over for trial. His next appearance will be a pretrial conference hearing before Judge Marvin D. Bagley on Aug. 8.
Brown was arrested Dec. 20, 2021 at a home owned by his parents. The arrest came after law enforcement officers, based on a text message from Allen to her parents, traced the victim’s whereabouts to Loa in Wayne County, approximately 87 miles south of Ephraim.
According to a probable-cause statement, Brown held the victim against her will from Dec. 13-18 in 2021. She was freed after officers conducted a house-to-house search in Loa and found her at the house where Brown was living.
Snow College police and Sanpete County sheriff’s deputies played a key role in the search for Allen.
The young woman later said she had interacted with Brown via a social media app. The website for the app says “users can communicate without revealing their actual names or phone numbers and (the app)…doesn’t track the content of messages or the phone numbers of users. This makes it hard for law enforcement and parents to get almost any information about the person on the other end of the message.”
The victim said that at the time of her abduction, she only knew Brown by his username, “Cowboy.” She said they had been interacting for about three weeks prior to the incident.
