Richard Collins III was 23 and seemed like he had everything to live for. He was due to graduate from Bowie State University in Maryland on Tuesday with a degree in business, and had just been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He was visiting friends at the University of Maryland this weekend when his life was tragically cut short by what the police and FBI are investigating as a possible hate crime.
Collins was waiting with two other students for an Uber ride outside the Montgomery Hall dormitory on Regents Drive near U.S. 1 at about 3 a.m. Saturday when he was attacked.
The stabbing was captured by a surveillance camera, police said. They called it unprovoked.
Witnesses said the suspect was intoxicated and incoherent at the time of the attack, police said. Police have said the victim and suspect did not know each other.
Officers called to the scene found Collins wounded on the sidewalk, police said. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Sean Urbanski, 22, has been charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing death of Collins. What originally seemed to be a random and very unfortunate killing could now be tied to Urbanski’s membership in a racist group on Facebook.
The group, called "Alt-Reich Nation," contained racist posts, [University Police Chief David Mitchell said.]
"When I look at the information that's contained on that website, suffice it to say that it's despicable, it shows extreme bias against women, Latinos, persons of Jewish faith and especially African-Americans," Mitchell said.
The FBI digital forensics team will look for information online that sheds light on the case, Mitchell said.
This is devastating for Collins’ family, who now has to arrange for a funeral for their loved one instead of celebrating his graduation. But it’s also yet another reminder for black people that we are not truly safe anywhere, especially on predominantly white college campuses.
Recently, there have been a series of racist incidents on college campuses in the Washington, DC area. A noose was found in fraternity house on the University of Maryland campus. At American University, bananas with racist messages hung around campus from nooses, along with calls on a white supremacist website to harass the newly-elected first black female student government president.
This type of racism isn’t new for black people, and neither is ongoing and systematic racial terror at the hands of white people. While we don’t know what exactly motivated Urbanski, we do know that he was a member of a racist group online. And black people cannot help but feel a heightened sense of pain and anxiety when we hear about these kinds of incidents, since we now have a leader in the White House who has helped to foster an environment where bigotry, xenophobia, and racism no longer need to be hidden.
This is where we are in 2017. The more things change, the more the stay the same.
Richard Collins seemed like an amazing person. He was described as "a very caring individual. He was highly intelligent and he was at the peak of his career. He loved his family, he loved people that he came in contact with, and more importantly he loved his God." But he needn’t have been amazing to mourn him. He represents yet another black life needlessly cut short at the hands of white violence. When will this vicious cycle end?