A former Pennsylvania police officer charged with sexually assaulting two young girls more than two decades ago was killed early Wednesday during a gunfire exchange with police who recognized his vehicle and confronted him, according to Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele.\n<\/p>\n
Francis Connell Collier, 38, who resigned in December from the Morton Police Department in suburban Philadelphia after being placed on leave because of the investigation, was fatally shot at 3:48 a.m. in Bala Cynwyd, near his home.\n<\/p>\n
A criminal complaint filed Tuesday in Delaware County accused Collier of child rape, endangering the welfare of children and related sex offenses. The victims were under the age of 13 at the time.\n<\/p>\n
Collier failed a polygraph in early December and told a detective afterward \u201cthat he \u2018never intentionally touched the girls inappropriately,\u2019\u201d police wrote in the probable cause affidavit.\n<\/p>\n
Lower Merion Township officers on patrol knew Collier was facing criminal charges and saw him returning to his car, Steele said in a release.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen they confronted him, Collier fired at the officers, who returned fire, fatally wounding Collier,\u201d Steele said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A former Pennsylvania police officer charged with sexually assaulting two young girls more than two decades ago was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48391,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[212,183,185,184,186],"class_list":["post-124187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lower-merion","tag-delaware-county","tag-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion-headlines","tag-lower-merion-news","tag-lower-merion-township"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}