Montgomery County<\/a> District Attorney Kevin Steele said Thursday that as the officers went to arrest Collier, they heard a gunshot from within his Jeep, and saw a bullet exit the vehicle\u2019s rear window.<\/p>\nThe officers, whom Steele did not identify, believed they were being shot at and fired on the vehicle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis was a dangerous situation where police were attempting to arrest an armed man on an arrest warrant,\u201d said Steele. \u201cOur investigation determined the facts of this case justified the use of deadly force by police officers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the car, investigators found Collier shot three times in the head, once from a self-inflicted gunshot, Steele said. It was not clear from Collier\u2019s autopsy which of the three shots killed him.<\/p>\n
Beside him was a bulletproof vest, a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol, two rifles and a second handgun, investigators said.<\/p>\n
The criminal case against Collier began late last year, authorities said, when Delaware County investigators learned that he may have sexually abused children.<\/p>\n
Two women told investigators Collier had touched them inappropriately in the early 2000s, when they were five and six years old and Collier was a teenager, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest. The women said the abuse began in 2001 and 2003, the affidavit said.<\/p>\n
Years later, the women said, they learned that Collier worked with the Delaware County District Attorney\u2019s child abuse task force, which investigates sex crimes against children. They said they grew worried when they saw social media posts showing Collier posing with children, the document said.<\/p>\n
When investigators interviewed Collier about the allegations in early December, the affidavit said, he failed a polygraph test, but told detectives he \u201cnever intentionally touched the girls inappropriately.\u201d<\/p>\n
County investigators referred the case to the Pennsylvania Attorney General\u2019s Office that month because of a possible conflict of interest, the affidavit said. State investigators later interviewed people who said the women had told them of the abuse years ago when they were children, and prosecutors filed the criminal charges against Collier just hours before his death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min Two Lower Merion Police officers were justified in shooting a former Delaware County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":149372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[68216,183,185,184,186],"class_list":["post-149371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lower-merion","tag-francis-collier-shooting-justified-montgomery-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\/149371","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=149371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/149372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}