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Jetuan Helen Wheeler is seen in an undated photo provided by the Hennepin County, Minn., Sheriff's Office. Prosecutors say Wheeler beat her boyfriend to death, taped his body up in plastic and hid it in a freezer because he was trying to break up with her. (AP Photo/Hennepin County Sheriff's Office)
MINNEAPOLIS >> A Minnesota woman beat her boyfriend to death, wrapped his body in plastic and duct tape, then hid it in a freezer because he was trying to break up with her, prosecutors said.
Jetaun Wheeler, 29, was charged Monday with second-degree murder in the killing of the 58-year-old man at their Shorewood home around Aug. 1. Authorities have not named the victim.
According to the criminal complaint filed in Hennepin County, detectives found the man’s frozen body in a freezer in the garage of a house that the couple had shared in Shorewood, 18 miles west of Twin Cities.
"It was a big trunk freezer, the kind your grandmother had," said Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman.
A friend of the victim told investigators that the victim had called July 31 to say Wheeler had assaulted him and that he was leaving her and heading back to Chicago, according to the complaint.
The complaint says the freezer was purchased Aug. 5, according to the Star Tribune.
Wheeler told investigators looking into the man’s disappearance that he had taken the bus to Chicago, according to court documents. Detectives said when they searched the couple’s house Aug. 21, they found bloody carpet under Wheeler’s mattress. Blood spatter led them to the garage where they found the body in the freezer.
Freeman told the Star Tribune that authorities are searching for Wheeler’s three children, aged 10, 8 and 7, and that they could be placed in protective custody.
"We don’t know what the children went through," he said.
