Kriti Mehrotra
Vincent Simmons was just 25 when he was sentenced to 100 years in prison after being accused of violently raping Karen and Sharon Sanders — a set of 14-year-old twins — a crime he maintains he never committed. However, as explored in ’48 Hours: Please Don’t Tell,’ Karen and Sharon Sanders insist he’s guilty despite recently agreeing to drop the charges against him and the supposed odd involvement of Keith Laborde. So now, if you wish to find out more about the latter, especially the details of his relationship with the sisters as well as his possible current whereabouts, here’s all that we know.
Who is Keith Laborde?
At the time of the alleged incident on the evening of May 9, 1977, an 18-year-old reported Marine Corps officer Keith Laborde was with Karen and Sharon Sanders, who are his first cousins. He was driving them back home from his place when he picked up a hitchhiker from 7-11, as per their accounts, only for it to end up with him forced into the trunk of his vehicle at knifepoint. Like the girls, once they went to the authorities with this ordeal two weeks later, Keith insisted their assailant was a Black man, whom they all individually later identified as Vincent Simmons from a lineup.
With that said, though, one of their other cousins has since claimed that the trio lied at every step of the way, which is something Keith personally told her at a bar long after Vincent’s conviction. “He told me that he had consensual sex with one of the girls and locked the other in the trunk,” Dana Brouillette stated in a sworn affidavit. She later explained, “He had gone down Little California Road, and he locked Sharon in the trunk, and he said the sex between him and Karen was consensual. He said, but the other one was a little hellcat… [She] put the scratches on his neck.”
Dana actually believes Keith, Karen, and Sharon concocted the story of a Black man attacking them to justify the noticeable scratches, along with the state of their overall appearance that night. But Karen clarified the entire situation in an interview with CBS by stating that although she did engage in consensual sex with Keith, it was way before the summer of 1977. She was reportedly just a child back then, whereas he was a teenager, and they “experimented. But that has nothing to do with what Vincent did. That’s two separate incidents. That’s two separate things,” she said.
Keith Laborde Prefers to Live a Quiet Life Today
Despite the (seemingly unsupported) accusations against him, Keith Laborde has outrightly denied ever having sex with Karen, according to ’48 Hours.’ He told the production that they only “played around like children,” nothing less and nothing more, but yes, every part of it was consensual. Coming to his current standing, in his 60s, it appears as if the Louisiana native prefers to keep well away from the limelight these days because he purportedly has a family of his own.
Keith wholeheartedly maintains that Vincent is guilty, which is why when CNN approached him for an interview in 2020, he reportedly let his anger out in the form of profanities, threats, and racial slurs directed toward him. Keith concluded with, “This sh*t happened. It’s real. It happened. And I’m not dealing with this no more I’m not looking over my shoulder anymore… I had enough of this sh*t.”
Read More: Where is Vincent Simmons Now?
