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Possible final pre-trial hearing scheduled in August for Collins in sex assault case
Possible final pre-trial hearing scheduled in August for Collins in sex assault case

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By Jenni Carlson

Published: July 22, 2007

TEXARKANA, Texas — Something happened inside Room 207 at the Comfort Suites one spring night three years ago.

The 62-room hotel with an indoor pool blends into the interstate access road's landscape of chain restaurants and convenience stores in this city divided by the Texas-Arkansas border.

It is only five minutes from sprawling Texas High School, which was celebrating its junior-senior prom. Half a dozen friends gathered there afterward. An older brother paid about $100 for the room. He paid for the alcohol, too.

Today, Chris Collins is a sophomore star-to-be linebacker at Oklahoma State. That night, the 17-year-old was there.

So was a 12-year-old girl.

What occurred in those early-morning hours of May 23, 2004, is a mystery a jury will decide.

Was that girl raped repeatedly?

Was Collins, described by an administrator as a good student and by a teammate as a quiet guy, involved?

This much we know — Collins was banished from Texas High, a program patterned after Mack Brown's Texas. The only thing missing is the Longhorn on the helmet. Sent to alternative school for his senior year, Collins did not play football that fall.

The University of Texas stripped his football scholarship, too. Once a bright Friday night light, he faded.

Almost two years passed before Collins played football again — in Stillwater.

Even as the Cowboys go through two-a-days, Collins is scheduled to return to Texarkana next month. He and three other men charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child will be in court Aug. 20. It might be the final pre-trial hearing before a trial date is set in Collins' aggravated sexual assault case.

Collins has denied having sex with the girl, but his future as an OSU football player is riding on this trial.

So, what happened?

In his two-plus years at OSU, Collins has not spoken to reporters. He was off-limits to the media last season as a first-year player, then suffered a season-ending knee injury when he was the team's leading tackler.

This week, Collins declined comment about his case.

His lawyer in Texarkana, Paul Hoover, also declined to talk about details of the case.

"We have real ethical concerns about trying this in the press,” he said. "I will tell you this — Chris is a great kid. He hasn't been in trouble before or since, and we will defend him as rigorously as possible.”

In May, Collins received a deferred sentence after pleading no contest to a November charge of driving with a suspended license.

San Antonio lawyer Anthony Cantrell, who is representing one of the other defendants, refused comment. The other defense attorneys, Clyde Lee and Rick Shumaker, could not be reached.

Messages to Bowie County Assistant District Attorney Nicole Habersang also went unreturned.

OSU football coach Mike Gundy has continued to refuse comment about the case until it's resolved.

If convicted of the felony, Collins and the three other men will face five to 99 years or life in prison.

"It's such a complex case ... you want to make sure,” said Sergeant Shawn Fitzgerald, spokesman for the Texarkana Police Department. "You want to do it on every case, but with something like this ... if you can imagine a young girl and her family and what they've been through in this period of time, then you want to make sure you do it right.

"It's a heinous crime.”

• • •

When police responded to a Sunday morning call from the emergency room at St. Michael Health Center, they found a 12-year-old girl in exam room No. 25.

This is what she told police:

She had made a new friend, a 15-year-old girl, and had invited her to spend the night. Sometime after midnight, they called a teenager attending the after-prom gathering at the Comfort Suites. Soon, a car arrived at the house. Chris Collins and friend Charles Johnson, then 18 years old, drove the girls to the party.

When they arrived, they found one female and about five males in the hotel room.

The girl said she was encouraged to drink vodka and became intoxicated.

She told police she remembered two males on top of her on the bed "taking turns.”

The girl struggled to recall much else after that.

When the 12-year-old returned home early that morning, though, she did not have her underwear on and complained of pain in her vaginal area.

That's when her mother drove her to the hospital. There, medical personnel administered a rape kit, a battery of tests and exams to collect and preserve evidence in a sexual assault case. Among their observations were bruising on the neck and scratches on the arms and shoulders.

Three days later, police arrested Collins' former Texas High teammate, Jabari Asim Jackson, then 18 years old. He told investigators that he had sex with the girl at the hotel but that he did not realize she was only 12.

The next day, police issued a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Edward Collins, Jr.

Texas High's on-campus police officer took him into custody that Thursday morning at school. As the hulking linebacker was loaded into the squad car, he sobbed.

• • •

Chris Collins was the crown prince of East Texas high school football.

After Texas High won state in 2002, Collins became the latest, greatest player in a land that produced the likes of Earl Campbell and Adrian Peterson. Only a sophomore playing the defense's quarterback position, he earned second-team all-state honors at linebacker.

"You could tell he was super,” said Al Hanna, the radio voice of Texas High football. "He had the size, and he had the speed, and he had all the natural abilities that most kids just don't have.”

Hanna has been calling games for 43 years. He is as much Texas High historian as play-by-play announcer.

During that time, dozens of college players have worn Texas High's burnt orange, including Michigan freshman Ryan Mallett, the country's top quarterback recruit a year ago. A few alums even reached the NFL, Chicago cornerback Nathan Vasher among them.

"Up until Mallett, I would have told you Chris Collins was the most talented, athletic-wise football player that I've seen here in 40 years,” Hanna said. "You could just see that this kid was going to be a super college player and had the ability maybe to go on to the pros.”

Recruiters thought highly of Collins, too. Before his junior season, he received and accepted a scholarship offer from Texas.

He committed to the Longhorns soon after Texas High teammate Nate Jones. A year older than Collins, Jones played varsity as a freshman and knew what Collins was going through when he became a starter as a sophomore.

"He was a quiet kid at first,” said Jones, a senior receiver at Texas. "Chris looked up to me ... and I really just took him in.”

They would play video games or eat dinner together, things they still do when they're both back home.

"I'm just glad to have him as a friend,” Jones said.

Texarkana superintendent Dr. Larry Sullivan said Collins had no history of disciplinary problems.

Teachers at Texas High even went so far as to consider him an excellent student.

This is a school that has struggled in the past with academic standards — with deep roots in timber, agriculture and manufacturing, the hard-scrabble life creates tough situations and tougher kids — but academics have improved in recent years. A new math and science building with an orange-lit tower reminiscent of the University of Texas's opened earlier this year.

That is hardly the only new facility at Texas High, which is a Class 4A school, the second-largest school classification in the state. A dance studio should be completed later this year. A new performing arts center is in the works next. But the biggest of the new structures is an almost full-length indoor football field.

"If you asked my school board, ‘Is football the No. 1 priority?' ” Sullivan said, "they would tell you, ‘No.'

"On Friday night, is everybody in town at the Texas High ball game?”

He smiled.

"Yes.”

So, when people in this town of 64,000 heard about Collins' arrest, they were shocked. Then again, this is a town fiercely loyal and protective of its own. News of Collins' and Jackson's arrests in May didn't appear in the local newspaper until late August.

"We hadn't heard anything bad about the kid,” Hanna said of Collins. "Now, we've had some other kids where ... I'd say, ‘Yeah. Uh, huh.' ”

He shook his thinning head of hair.

Hanna had interviewed Collins, heard his quiet voice and his "yes, sir.”

"That's just Chris, very polite, very nice,” Hanna said. "He was just a super kid. That's why this whole thing surprises everybody.”

In those spring and summer days following his arrest, Chris Collins faced a harsh reality. Because he'd been arrested for a felony, the school district placed him in the alternative school. Because he'd been charged with sexual assault of a 12-year-old, the Longhorns yanked his scholarship offer.

Collins didn't play football as a senior, and after appearing on OSU's two-a-days roster the next fall, he was quickly removed. He did not play again until the Cowboys opened spring practice in 2006.

All the while, the police continued to investigate what happened in Room 207.

They arrested Collins and Jackson less than a week after the incident, but the DNA obtained at the hospital by the rape kit produced two unknown sets of genetic material.

On Nov. 28, 2005, Texarkana police received a letter from the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab in Garland. The DNA obtained from the 12-year-old girl belonged to a set of brothers, Aaron Delaney Johnson, then 27, and Charles Alexander Johnson, 18.

Was there DNA evidence from all four defendants?

"I can't comment on that,” Fitzgerald, the police spokesman, said. "DNA evidence was obtained in this case, and that evidence will be presented.”

Two years after police responded to the emergency room call at St. Michael, they closed the case and turned it over to the district attorney. The prosecution packet is as thick as a football is round.

That was May 2006.

Chris Collins was finishing his first semester at OSU.

• • •

Less than two weeks before Oklahoma State opens its season at Georgia, Chris Collins could know his court date.

It could be scheduled before the regular-season finale at Oklahoma.

All four defendants in this case are due in Bowie County District Court on Aug. 20. Collins and Jackson have what could be their final pre-trial hearing. If no motions are filed that Monday morning requiring more pre-trial hearings, the court could set a date for trial.

The case against the Johnson brothers is slightly ahead of the other. The brothers' trial is scheduled to begin Aug. 20, though the district attorney's chief investigator, Gary Owen, says there's a chance it will be delayed.

How soon Collins and Jackson could go to trial remains to be seen, though Owen believes it will be sometime this fall.

"It's not just gonna go away,” he said.

Was it rape?

A jury will decide what happened in Room 207.