A federal judge has ruled that a University of South Alabama campus police officer will not be held financially liable in the 2012 shooting death of an 18-year-old freshman, closing out a civil case that had loomed over the department for nearly three years.
U.S. District Court Judge William Steele determined that Officer Trevis Austin, who remains employed by the university’s police department, does not owe damages to the parents of Gilbert Collar, a Wetumpka native who was shot and killed outside USA police headquarters in October 2012. Collar’s parents had said any money awarded in the suit would fund a scholarship in their son’s name after legal costs.
The ruling capped a lengthy legal process. The university and its police chief at the time were cleared of wrongdoing early on, and Austin himself faced no criminal charges over the shooting. The Collar family filed the civil suit in 2014, arguing the shooting was unjustified.
In his ruling, Judge Steele emphasized that the case had to be evaluated based on what a reasonable officer would have perceived in the moment, not with the benefit of hindsight. According to the judge’s findings, Austin was alone without backup when Collar, who had unknowingly ingested a synthetic drug, approached the police headquarters and began knocking on the glass windows. Austin came outside with his weapon drawn, and after several tense minutes of erratic behavior from Collar, the officer fired, killing him steps from the department’s front door.
Court testimony included details from the university’s police chief at the time, who said photographic evidence showed stippling consistent with Collar being shot at close range, within about two feet of the officer. Both the former chief and another officer who was on the force during the incident and has since become a police chief in the region testified that they believed they would have made the same decision under the same circumstances.
The university’s police department does not equip officers with Tasers, relying instead on batons and pepper spray, a policy the former chief has publicly defended as unnecessary to change.
The shooting drew national and international attention at the time and remains a point of discussion on campus and in the surrounding community years later. Collar, who would have graduated from the university this spring, is remembered by many in the USA community as a case that continues to shape conversations about campus policing and mental health crisis response.
With the civil case now resolved, the legal chapter of the Collar case has closed, though its impact on how the university trains and equips its police force continues to be debated locally.