The story of how Michael D. Collins and his son, Teven, beat and robbed a cross-country skier at Dougan Falls last year has already been splashed across every local TV news station and on the front page of newspapers.
Now, in Michael Collins’ trial this week in Clark County Superior Court, jurors will hear the story about their broken family.
The 35-year-old Clark County man is on trial for custodial interference, intimidating a witness and telephone harassment relating to allegations he violated a custody order when he reunited with his son, -Teven, taking him to California and then Dougan Falls before the Feb. 9, 2009, attack of the skier.
In fact, attorneys in their opening statements Tuesday gave no mention of the attack that landed the father-son pair on the TV show “America’s Most Wanted.”
They, instead, focused on the father and son’s broken relationship and how Teven, a troubled teenager constantly on the run, reunited with his father in December 2008.
The issue of this trial: Did Teven’s mother really have primary custody of her son if he was constantly running away? And was Teven old enough to reunite with his father freely and voluntarily?
Michael Collins was sentenced in February to about 24 years in prison after a Skamania County jury found him guilty of first-degree attempted murder and robbery in the skier attack.
If convicted on the new charges and a separate charge of failure to register as a sex offender, Michael Collins could face between six and 16 additional years in prison if the judge decides to run the new sentence consecutive to his current sentence.
Teven Collins pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted murder and was given eight years in prison.
Son sought him out
In his opening statement, Deputy Prosecutor Alan Harvey said Michael Collins and Teven’s mother, Anna Logan of Washougal, were married for about six years in the 1990s before they divorced. Logan had primary custody of their three children, including Teven.
After being sent to live with his grandparents in Montana, Teven ran away and went to the Vancouver area. Through friends, he met up with Michael Collins’ girlfriend, who acquainted him with his father. In January 2009, the Collinses along with two of Teven’s friends went to Apple Valley, Calif., to look for work.
It was then that Logan learned through the mother of Teven’s friend that the father and son were together.
After discovering his mom knew his whereabouts, Teven called her. In the background, Logan said she heard Michael Collins allegedly shout that he’d “shoot her, burn down her house and kill himself” if she notified police, Harvey said.
This constitutes the intimidating a witness and telephone harassment charges, he said.
Meanwhile, after having no luck finding jobs, the group came back to Vancouver, and the Collinses went to Dougan Falls in early February 2009.
“The plan was that they were going to be mountain men,” Harvey said.
Skimming past the details of the attack in which a skier, Kevin Tracey, was beaten nearly to death and robbed for his car, Harvey said the two “were able to locate an automobile” and drove back through California and into Mexico, where they were arrested.
It’s standard procedure for prosecutors to not mention a separate criminal case because it could unfairly prejudice the defendant.
In her opening statement, defense attorney Suzan Clark zeroed in on the parenting plan issued in the mid-1990s that granted Collins visitation only every other weekend, questioning whether it was still valid considering it wasn’t being followed. Teven wasn’t staying with his mother on a consistent basis, instead running away or being sent to stay with relatives to get straightened out.
The case, she said, was really about a teen who desperately wanted to have his dad in his life, a decision he was old enough to make at 16.
“He’s living the lifestyle of a pretty unhappy kid,” she said. “He’ll testify that he wanted to see his dad. He wanted to get together with his dad.”
And about the alleged threatening phone call, Clark said there was no evidence Michael Collins made those remarks.
The trial is expected to conclude Wednesday.
