As protests over the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, dominated national headlines in late 2014, some commentators reached back to a case from the Gulf Coast for comparison: the 2012 death of University of South Alabama freshman Gilbert “Gil” Collar. Local officials in Mobile pushed back hard on the parallel, arguing that the two situations were fundamentally different and, above all, handled in very different ways.
Collar, 18, was shot and killed on the University of South Alabama campus by a campus police officer while he was unclothed and, investigators later determined, under the influence of a synthetic drug. The shooting rattled the university community, but according to Mobile County officials it never spiraled into the kind of prolonged unrest that followed the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson. The difference, they said, came down largely to communication.
“Communication was the key to it,” Mobile County Sheriff Sam Cochran said. Less than 12 hours after Collar’s death, the university held a news conference and released a statement. School officials described a philosophy of being as open and transparent as possible with students and the public during a crisis, and a mass email went out to students and staff. Coverage of the incident quickly spread far beyond Alabama, reaching national and international outlets.
A week after the shooting, Cochran took a further step that he credited with easing tensions: he invited members of the news media, including student journalists, to view the surveillance footage of the encounter from the officer’s vantage point. Reporters watched the recording twice and were allowed to describe what they saw. “In the Gil Collar case, the community was very concerned,” Cochran said, noting that parents were asking whether the campus was safe. “I think the communication calmed people down.” By contrast, he argued, authorities in Ferguson withheld information for weeks, fueling speculation.
Sheriff’s spokeswoman Lori Myles said a strong working relationship with the press is essential to preventing rumors from filling an information vacuum. “The media is going to publish information directly from the source,” she said, adding that Ferguson officials could have benefited from holding early news conferences. She also pointed to a central distinction between the two cases: “They’re focusing on race. This was never that.”
Mobile County District Attorney Ashley Rich agreed that the Collar case was managed “more effectively,” crediting close cooperation among prosecutors, law enforcement and journalists. “We felt that it was very important to make the media aware of what was going on, and that didn’t allow for rampant speculation,” she said.
For Cochran, the episode reinforced a broader lesson about how such incidents are perceived. “Shootings are not as they appear on TV,” he said, arguing that letting the public see the evidence for itself allowed both sides of the story to be told. The Collar case remained a painful chapter for the university, but local leaders held it up as an example of how transparency can keep a community tragedy from becoming a crisis of trust.