A 17-year-old boy who pleaded guilty in September to assaulting a couple with a baseball bat at St. Paul's Lake Phalen has died at the state correctional facility in St. Cloud, a corrections spokeswoman said.

"There is no appearance of foul play" in the death of Wang Moua Vue, said Shari Burt, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections.

She said that Vue died on Nov. 14, but that the department was withholding additional details because it had yet to receive a medical examiner's ruling on the cause of death, and because the department's Office of Special Investigations still had an open file on the case.

The office investigates all prison deaths, Burt said.

Tom Vue, the dead boy's father, said Monday that he was anxious for answers: "He is too young to die," he said.

On Sept. 11, Wang Vue pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree assault in the Aug. 4 attack on the couple. It occurred about the same time as a vigil was being held nearby for a woman who had been severely beaten in a baseball-bat attack at the lake.

Burt said Vue, who was charged as an adult, was admitted to the St. Cloud facility on Sept. 17, and was to serve two consecutive sentences that would have expired in November 2011.

I love happy endings.

Happy ending, no, poetical justice, maybe.

any 17 year old dying is a tragedy. What got him to where he was involved in what he did is probably just as tragic.

Do I feel sorry for him, no. but I don't like any kids the same age as my kids dying.

+1

Age has nothing to do with being a piece of human trash. Too bad our justice system cannot make the punishment part of the crime painful, embarrassing, miserable, and public. That way people will think twice.

Too bad our justice system cannot make the punishment part of the crime painful, embarrassing, miserable, and public.