Suspect in violent rape last year of UW-Madison student intends to plead guilty

In a letter to Dane County Circuit Judge Ellen Berz filed in court Tuesday, Brandon A. Thompson’s attorney asks that her client’s next court date, scheduled for Thursday, be converted to a plea hearing or that a plea hearing be scheduled for later.

The letter provides no reason for the change of plea and Thompson’s attorney, Emily Bell, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said his office had not offered to reduce any of the charges against Thompson and “I would believe there will be a plea to the charges and the case will be set for sentencing.”

Dane County Deputy District Attorney William Brown last year called the Sept. 3, 2023, attack on the woman Thompson, 27, didn’t know “one of the most horrific sexual assaults in recent memory here in Dane County.”

The woman, who is in her 20s, was walking home sometime after 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning in the 500 block of West Wilson Street when Thompson “saw red,” he told investigators, according to the criminal complaint in the case.

He later said he remembered hitting the woman repeatedly but could not be sure that he sexually assaulted her. The attack left the woman naked, covered in blood and unconscious, according to the complaint, and she was later diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury, multiple lacerations and broken teeth, a broken jaw and two swollen eyes.

At the time the charges were filed, she was “on a feeding tube and unable to provide a statement as she shows extreme signs of confusion when awake,” the complaint says, and had to be put into a medically induced coma immediately after the attack.

Thompson’s bail was set at $1 million and he’s been in the Dane County Jail since three days after the attack on charges of first-degree sexual assault causing great bodily harm, first-degree reckless injury, and strangulation and suffocation.

Bell on Oct. 1 filed a motion asking to extend the time limit Thompson had for pleading not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. The motion says Thompson’s defense had retained a psychologist who had examined Thompson but that he needed more time to complete his report, which was supposed to happen by Oct. 4. A judge in the case had previously entered a not guilty plea on Thompson’s behalf, a common procedural move in criminal cases when the defendant chooses not to enter a plea.

A hearing Thursday had originally been scheduled to take up a number of prosecution and defense motions but was rescheduled Tuesday as a plea hearing.

According to the criminal complaint:

Police interviewed a woman who said the victim arrived at her apartment around 8 p.m. Sept. 2, 2023, and left at about 2:15 a.m. the next day. The woman told police the victim was not the type of person to party or use drugs. She also didn’t respond when the woman texted her at about 2:45 a.m. to see if she’d made it home OK.

About a half-hour later, police were sent to the crime scene after getting a call from a woman who lives nearby because Thompson had called to her from outside her apartment to say he’d been taking a “high walk” and found the victim in the street and carried her behind a residence.

After the woman saw the victim’s condition, she called police, which made Thompson “antsy,” the woman later told police, as he told her he didn’t want to be around police while he was high. He left the scene before police arrived.

Videos from private and public surveillance cameras show the victim walking west from the area of Park Street and West Washington Avenue to the CVS store at Bedford Street and then onto West Main Street, where video also captured images of a man matching Thompson’s description watching her from the other side of the street after he’d parked his car at nearby Brittingham Park.

No video showing the attack was recovered, but there was some showing Thompson’s vehicle leaving the Brittingham parking lot just after 3 a.m. Sunday. Fitchburg police also pulled Thompson over at around 1:15 a.m. Sunday morning, before the assault, and police body camera footage from that interaction showed Thompson wearing the same kind of black sweatshirt and gray pants as seen on the man who parked in the Brittingham lot.

Madison police said on Sept. 6, 2023, that Thompson was arrested that day at 12:24 a.m. at a hospital where he was seeking medical treatment but declined to describe the nature of the treatment, citing medical privacy laws.

Interviewed later by detectives, Thompson admitted to being angry before the alleged attack and wanting to “hit something.” He told detectives he encountered a woman and “saw red,” “didn’t know what was going on” and that “she came across as a monster.”

“I went into a rage, when I came to, she was on the ground,” he said, according to the complaint, and while he didn’t remember raping the woman, he told police, “I could have.”

DNA left on the victim and collected from Thompson were “consistent with the profile of Brandon Thompson,” according to analysis by the State Crime Lab.

During Thompson’s bail hearing last year, Brown said investigators had learned Thompson “was simply driving down the street and saw the victim, had no prior interaction or contact with the victim, and spontaneously decided to pull his car over, most of this occurring on camera, follow her for some distance around the Downtown area, and then attack her.”

Bell said at the time that Thompson had no prior criminal record, is a college graduate and resident of Dane County, and that his defense team has “uncovered some evidence that is inconsistent with the state’s narrative.”

Thompson’s last home address was in the village of Brooklyn.