A 21-year-old man has been sentenced to nearly five years in prison for breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s St. Paul apartment and beating her and her friend with a baseball bat.

Bryant Darrel Bramstedt, of St. Paul, was sentenced in Ramsey County District Court on Friday after pleading guilty to first-degree burglary in connection with the Sept. 3 attack in the city’s Dayton’s Bluff neighborhood that left a 35-year-old man with life-threatening injuries.

According to the criminal complaint, police officers were sent to the 200 block of Frank Street after Bramstedt called 911 about 3:30 a.m. and reported an assault.

Bramstedt told officers his 25-year-old girlfriend invited him over and said to get inside through a window. Once inside, he said, she was screaming that a man was hurting her.

He said the man “pounced” at him, so he hit him two to three times in the head with a baseball bat.

Officers located the man on the kitchen floor hunched over a large pool of blood. Blood was dripping from his face, which was swollen, and he was groaning and moaning and unable to speak. Medics transported him to the hospital, where he was treated for skull fractures and bleeding and swelling in the brain.

The woman also had cuts and other injuries to her head. She told officers Bramstedt is her ex-boyfriend and does not live with her and that she did not invite him over.

She said she was lying in bed with her friend and woke up to Bramstedt standing next to them. Bramstedt grabbed a baseball bat she kept next to her bed and without warning hit them in the head. Her friend crawled to the kitchen.

She believed that Bramstedt entered through a window by an air conditioning unit.

Three other charges in the case were dismissed as part of a plea deal Bramstedt reached with the prosecution in February: one count each of first- and second-degree assault and a second first-degree burglary count. He was given credit for just over eight months already served in custody.

At the time of the attack, Bramstedt had three open felony cases in Ramsey County District Court.

The plea deal also included dismissing two of them: a July 2022 case for fleeing police in a motor vehicle and an April 2024 case for drug possession (fentanyl), carrying a firearm in public without a permit and receiving stolen property.

Bramstedt pleaded guilty to a charge of aiding and abetting first-degree aggravated robbery stemming from a February 2023 carjacking in St. Paul. On Friday, he was given a four-year prison sentence for that case, which will run at the same time as the 58-month term for the burglary conviction.