‘His blood cries out’: For 31 years, woman seeks answers for brother shot at 13
The bullet that ripped through 13-year-old Roy Collins’ back wouldn’t kill him for 13 years.
Death came slowly, cutting an insidious path of crippled — then amputated — legs before completely choking his circulatory system at the age of 26.
Angela Collins, Roy’s older sister, never believed what criminal investigators said happened in the 3 a.m. darkness more than 31 years ago.
Police blamed the shooting on a startled Kansas City homeowner who leaped out of bed and ran with a gun to his back porch as Roy rattled over backyard fences, chased by a police officer.
Someone shot Roy in the back that early morning in 1987, felling him in a nearby yard. But no one was ever held accountable for it. The state tried to prosecute the homeowner and failed to get an indictment from a grand jury.
Roy’s sister, now 51, carries an aging copy of the police file that she stuffs in a worn backpack. The matting of torn and bent-eared pages first belonged to her mother, who passed it on to Angela before she died in 2006.
Both of them wanted Roy’s crippling to be investigated as a police shooting.
No one listened to them, Angela Collins said. They are a family of “scrappers,” seeking out salvageable goods in other people’s trash. Some family members carry criminal records of their own.
“Get justice,” Angela’s mother implored her.
The police file she carries from Roy’s shooting — The Star obtained its own copy — reveals an incomplete investigation that can’t answer her decades-old questions.
Neither is there a positive answer to be found from the two men with guns that morning who converged on Roy’s fallen body — the homeowner, Sal Marsala, and the police officer, George Winger.
The Star sought out both of them this year, knocking on their doors.
The case file included no statement from Marsala, and Angela Collins never gathered the nerve to find him and ask.
So his account had never been told — until now.
Marsala, reluctantly stepping out onto his front porch, at first did not want to revisit what happened in his former Northeast neighborhood that morning on May 10, 1987. He said he’d rather just let it be than try to trace back memories that seem so much a blur to him now.
But some things he was sure of.
He wasn’t the only one who fired a weapon that morning, Marsala said. He saw gun flashes to his right. There was a “flurry of shots,” he said.
He remembers firing warning shots, not aiming at anyone.
“I didn’t shoot anybody,” he said.
The retired officer Winger, who lives on a rural ranch northeast of Kansas City, met a Star reporter on his driveway. He didn’t want to talk about that morning either.
“I stood before a grand jury on that,” he said. “I gave my statement. Other than that I’ve got nothing else to say.”
In a parting comment, he wanted to be clear he fired no bullets. “My gun was not discharged,” he said.
The morning Roy was shot, Winger told detectives he had steered his car into a vacant lot to intercept the suspect he’d seen run from a stolen car. That’s when he heard three shots from behind a short row of houses, he said.
Winger said he ran to the fence and saw Roy fall in the yard next to Marsala’s. And he saw Marsala on the other side of the fence holding a gun.
There was no mention of Winger’s gun in the case record. Marsala was the only suspect.
The only other witness statement from the shooting would be what the record had from Roy himself, who said the person who shot him was wearing cowboy boots. Marsala, the record showed, was dressed only in jockey shorts.
The Star asked some criminal justice professionals to review the police file from the investigation.
“There are plenty of holes,” said Tricia Bath, an Overland Park defense attorney. The investigation failed to clearly establish where Roy was when he was shot and where the bullet came from, she said, and “there’s no way to know that now.”
Law enforcement officials looking at the case saw gaps, too, but nothing specific to refute the presumption that morning that the only gun fired was Marsala’s.
Kansas City Police spokesman Capt. Lionel Colón said there can be many reasons that reports on evidence, such as with bullets, are lacking. Bullets can be embedded in the ground, or be low quality and deteriorate on impact, he said.
More than one law enforcement official noted that the shooting that morning would have been one of several crime scenes that investigative teams worked that shift.
Angela Collins has little patience for excuses explaining missing evidence.
She won’t give up chasing after all her unanswered questions. She won’t let Roy’s death go.
“God’s going to prevail for my little brother,” she said. “His blood cries out from the ground to me.”
‘She told me to get justice’
When her letters and phone calls went nowhere, Angela Collins shouted with paint.
“CAN A POOR MAN GET JUSTICE?”
She knows someone saw that one. It stood out like the many messages over the years she slapped on her sidewalk and along the street.
“It was right here,” she said, “but big city trucks came and power-washed it all away.”
Angela talked feverishly, as if she was running out of time, on an October afternoon.
She had just returned home after spending 43 days in the city jail over a backlog of code violations on her house. The violations broke the conditions of her probation from a previous conviction.
The signs in glittered paint, once stapled to the side of her house, are also gone — declared a nuisance by the city. But she and her daughter have posted more signs in the yard in front of the boarded-up home.
“We want justice,” they say. “Love never ends.”
And, simply, “Roy.”
Roy was her little brother, nine years younger, the seventh of 10 siblings raised by Homer and Alice Collins. She called him “Dawg.”
Roy was mentally disabled, having the capacity of an elementary school child, family records show.
The bullet that crippled him entered his right side, pierced his right lung and ripped his backbone and spinal cord before exiting his left side, according to the doctor’s report in the case file.
“He never complained,” Angela said. It didn’t matter what pain came each time more of his legs were amputated and packed with gauze, or when internal organs began to fail, or when breathing itself took all his strength, she said. “He never complained about nothin’.”
He loved the songs of country singer George Jones.
“Still doin’ time in a honky tonk prison …,” was one he sang a lot, his sister said.
“Still doin’ time where a man ain’t forgiven …”
“The ‘prison,’” she said, “was his wheelchair.”
Roy was in a mess that Sunday morning he was shot. He was running around after midnight, jumping out of a stolen car along with an older companion, trying to get away from the police officer who’d seen the car run a red light.
The man running with him escaped. After Roy was shot, he told police the man was an acquaintance and gave a name, but no evidence supported that claim.
One person questioned by police named a relative of Roy’s, and police swept the car for his fingerprints, unsuccessfully. The relative — currently in prison on unrelated charges — declined The Star’s request for an interview.
The news of the day gave Roy’s shooting no attention. Anyone who looked at the surface of it would have seen a non-fatal wounding of a teenager by a homeowner protecting his property from an intruder in his yard.
But Roy’s mother, Alice Collins, quickly came to believe that police had neglected an investigation of what she thought was more likely a police officer shooting a fleeing 13-year-old.
When she couldn’t get what she wanted from police, Alice Collins in 1988 got a judge to direct them to provide her a copy of the investigative file, the same copy Roy’s sister Angela has now lugged around for years.
As she has carried on her mother’s cause, Angela Collins has written more letters than she can count to lawmakers, prosecutors, victims advocates and civil rights groups, pleading with them to look into the case.
And their responses, along with the tattered police file, also stuff her backpack — dismissive or apologetic replies over the years, saying they couldn’t help her.
“They all refer you to someone else,” she said.
It tortures her that no one has listened to her all these years.
Her family has a hard history. Maybe, she wondered, people see her missing teeth, which she said she lost when a fire burned 55 percent of her body years ago, and make judgments.
But she was once six hours short of a nursing degree, she said. She was going to be an anesthesiologist.
“I’m not dumb,” she said with angry tears. “I’m not a pushover.”
Where’s the bullet?
One by one this summer, retired lawmen who worked the case 31 years ago pondered the police file presented to them by The Star.
Few could recall the shooting. But gaps in the record became obvious.
Determining if Marsala’s gun — or someone else’s — fired the crippling bullet should be easy, more than one said. “Was the bullet recovered? That would tell you,” one detective said. Presuming, of course, that information was in the case file.
But there is nothing there.
There is no report on the crippling bullet — whether there were attempts to locate it or other bullets, whether any were found, or any ballistics done.
A bullet, discovered days later in a grill that would have been behind Marsala on his porch, was supposed to be tested to see if it matched the gun in evidence, but there is no further accounting of it.
Furthermore, a doctor’s report said the bullet that pierced Roy’s back entered his right side and exited his left. If Roy was running toward the back of Marsala’s neighbor’s fenced yard when he was shot — as described in the case file — his right side would have been exposed to the south, the direction from where Winger emerged.
Marsala on his porch would have been standing on the opposite side, to the north, behind Roy and over his left shoulder.
That doesn’t prove Marsala didn’t fire the bullet. Roy could have turned around, or fell backwards off the fence. There is no analysis. The doctor’s report sits alone in the file with no further documentation.
Another oddity: The file’s statements are inconsistent in describing who took custody of Marsala’s gun.
One report says the revolver, with four spent cartridges, was collected from Winger. But Winger’s own statement says that another officer had taken Marsala and his gun into custody when Winger departed with his dog to try to track the escaped suspect. Winger had no other contact with Marsala, he said.
The officer in Winger’s statement, also retired, told The Star he remembered that morning. He sat with Marsala at his kitchen table, he said. Marsala’s gun was lying there between them. “He (Marsala) said he shot him,” the officer said. There was a grand jury, the officer added, “and he was indicted.”
No, Marsala wasn’t indicted.
If the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office went before the grand jury with the evidence in the case file, it went without any information about any bullets that were fired, whatever gun they came from. Nor would there have been any analysis of the path of the bullet that pierced Roy’s body.
“Though the yard was reportedly well-lit and they could tell us the condition of every gate and toy and even went back days later,” Bath said, “it doesn’t look like anyone ever found that bullet.”
Whatever was found — or not found — should have been noted, she said. But it wasn’t.
Getting an indictment — which requires that the state simply show enough probable cause of a crime to forward charges for trial — is notoriously easy. Former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, Sol Wachtler, once famously argued that most prosecutors could get a grand jury “to indict a ham sandwich.”
On Jan. 22, 1988, some eight months after Roy was shot, the record shows a grand jury heard the case and declined to indict Marsala.
The prosecutor handling the case, Katharine Fincham, was early in what both Bath and a prosecutor agree was a highly respected career as a prosecutor for Jackson County and then the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City.
If the state had gone before a judge in a preliminary hearing to get charges, the prosecution’s case would have been public. But a grand jury’s work — and its reasons for not issuing an indictment — are secret.
Maybe the state didn’t push for a charge because prosecutors were concerned they did not have enough evidence to win beyond a reasonable doubt at trial, one prosecutor reviewing the file said. Maybe the grand jury was sympathetic to the idea of a homeowner defending his property.
The Star contacted Fincham. She replied through email, noting that prosecutors are ethically bound not to discuss their investigations where no one is charged, and that grand jury proceedings, by law, are secret.
“I’m afraid that the rules of law and ethics require that I respond, ‘No comment,’” she said.
‘I live here!’
Winger couldn’t see who was in the dark blue ‘86 Chevy Nova racing ahead of him on Brooklyn Avenue, he told detectives that morning.
The officer had been traveling west on Independence Avenue about 3:15 a.m. when he watched the Nova blow through a red light and speed north.
He couldn’t get closer than two blocks from the car, and he lost it when it shot a block back to the east, then north, going the wrong way on Ord Street.
Winger said he canvassed the area and saw the Nova freshly abandoned in the 2300 block of St. John Avenue. He saw a white male, about 5 feet 2 inches tall with long blond hair, on the run and jumping over a fence. Winger did not know that a second person had also fled from the car.
He ran a computer check on the car’s license plate and saw that it had been reported stolen. He radioed a description of the suspect and asked for assisting officers.
There was no statement in the file from Marsala to show how he got involved.
But he told The Star his wife woke him. Something was wrong, she said. He remembers hearing a helicopter. He remembers hearing the rattling of chain link fences as if they were being climbed.
He had a gun in a bedside stand and he ran with it to his back porch, straight out of his sleep, dressed only in jockey shorts, peering wildly into the dark morning.
As to what happened next, Winger’s old statement and Marsala’s present day memory don’t agree.
At one point in the case file, Winger said he was in his car, still driving south in the 100 block of Garfield Place, when he heard three gunshots. Elsewhere, he said he had driven his car into the vacant lot on the south side of the two houses on the block to intercept the suspect when he heard the shots.
He got out and saw the male that he’d been chasing fall to the ground, he said. He came upon him and saw him bleeding.
He told the detective that he then saw a man in jockey shorts on the other side of the fence approaching him with a gun in his hand. “He asked if he had ‘hit’ one of them,” Winger said.
Marsala told The Star he doesn’t know who shot first. He never saw the criminal case file and he did not know that the two people fleeing police were unarmed. He remembers firing untargeted shots to scare off the intruders. He thought the suspects fired a gun.
“There was a flurry of shots,” he said. The light flashes he remembers were south of him. He used the reporter’s notebook to sketch the scene — positioning himself on his porch, the fleeing youth on the other side of the fence in his neighbor’s yard, and the police officer beyond the next fence to the south.
Then he remembers dogs — two Dobermans. Winger said he had one dog. Marsala remembers someone shouting at him, asking who he was, and himself shouting back, “I’m the homeowner! I live here!”
Other officers quickly arrived, and one of them took Marsala into custody, also taking possession of his gun. They let him get dressed and they took him downtown.
The detective who took Winger’s statement — who died in 2009 — did not ask Winger if he fired his weapon. Winger’s statement, taken at 7:15 a.m., was clear that Marsala had shot Roy.
Q: The party who was shot by Salvatore Marsala, was that the same party that you observed running in the area where you had found the car abandoned?
A: Yes it was.
Q: Did Salvatore Marsala make any voluntary admissions to you at the scene?
A: Just when he asked me if he had hit one of them and when he told me that there had been a second suspect who had run from the area in the direction of which the suspect had ran.
Around that same time, Marsala was allowed to leave the station downtown and was picked up by his father.
The record says he never gave a statement, on the advice of an attorney, and that he was let go pending further investigation. Marsala’s recollection is that he spoke to detectives that morning downtown — at least enough that they asked if he’d be willing to take a lie detector test. He said he would.
He never had an attorney, he told The Star. Never needed one.
Detectives who interviewed Marsala that morning, reached by The Star, could not recall working the 31-year-old case.
Say no more
Marsala’s memory has faded too much for him to remember when it was after that morning that he was allowed to retrieve his gun, but it seems it was within a few months, he said.
He can’t remember the exact words the person said to him when he picked it up, but he says it was something like, “It didn’t match.”
For him, his involvement in what happened that frightening morning was done when he left the police facility with the gun in 1987.
He wished it had stayed that way. He did not want to talk about it again so many years later. He said he didn’t want to trouble the police.
He expressed his feelings for Roy’s family, saying he is sorry they have gone through so much pain over the years. And with that, he signed off, wishing to say no more.
Roy’s family has long felt sorry for Marsala as well, Angela Collins said. She believes he was an unwitting participant as the longstanding, unindicted suspect in her brother’s shooting.
She wrote Marsala a letter once, she said. She doesn’t know if he got it. She never did gather up the nerve to knock on his door.
But she has always wished she would someday hear his side of the story, wondering what he would say.
