LOCAL

Who attacked Rural King manager, why?

Seth Slabaugh
The Star Press
  • Report tips to Capt. Joe Todd (765) 747-4867 (ext 270) and attorney Linda Pence (317) 833-1111.

MUNCIE, Ind. — Greg Collett was in his office at Rural King on a random October afternoon last fall when a customer wandered into the hallway.

Greg Collett at an interview with The Star Press.

A cane that another customer had mistakenly left in the store was leaning against a wall, and the meandering customer exclaimed, "Mom, they got crutches!"

An employee in a nearby break room overheard Collett, the store's assistant manager, say, "I'm sorry, those canes aren't for sale."

Next, a thud. 

Then Collett pulled the cane away from the customer, stumbled into the break room and collapsed. 

The employee on break only saw the customer's profile, but others got a good look at him earlier.

As blood oozed from a crack on top of Collett's head, the employee called for help on his two-way radio, then heard the customer say, "Mom, they're getting security." A woman's voice tried to keep the customer calm, saying, "No, they're not. Come on, let's go. We got to go. It's time to go." The two hurried out of the store with a man who had been with them.

LATEST DEVELOPMENT: Police say they've found the Rural King attacker

Since then, life has been nothing short of a devastating medical whirlwind for Collett, and his family is now pleading for help from the public to find the man who destroyed — and nearly took — his life.

You could say the 60-year-old Collett — who loved being a store manager and was loved by many of his employees — survived the assault, but that wouldn't be entirely accurate. A turtle shell-like cap formed on top of his head and, indeed, the wound healed over.

But his family says he's a different person, like a stranger. He was hospitalized for five days. The diagnosis: traumatic brain injury, often referred to as TBI.

The customer and the two people with him were never seen again. But a private investigation into the devastating attack recently prompted Muncie police to reopen the case — and to release a surveillance photo of a suspect described as having an intellectual disability.

Muncie police released this surveillance video image of the suspect in an attack on a Rural King assistant manager.

"It's like a dream," Collett told the Star Press. "I asked him if I could help him, I think. He didn't say anything so I just turned away and got hit on the side of the head. It's like a dream. I don't know if it's even real. I turned back and he hit me again. That's all I remember."

His wife rouses him from sleep when he has nightmares. "I've had a couple of times when … I see a person, just the teeth, like smiling at me or making fun of me or something," he says of the bad dreams.

The TBI causes Collett to experience constant headaches, ringing in his ears, sharp pains in his head, a right hand that shakes and seizures

To make things worse, he has no memory of his life before the assault.

When Collett regained consciousness in the hospital, where he spent five days, his daughter, Yardley, said, "Hi dad." She says, "He had a complete blank, almost scared look on his face."

Collett has no recollection of anything before the attack, such as his birthday, where he went to high school (Wapahani graduate), or his marriage to Judy (Cowan High School graduate) in 1978. 

"The only reason he knows she is his wife is because everybody told him so," the family's attorney says.

Judy, Yardley and Greg Collett at her graduation from Shenandoah High School.

"In the hospital, they would ask him, 'Where is your wife?' And he would just look at them," Judy said. "He didn't know what wife meant." One day in the hospital, when Yardley was not there, Collett asked Judy, "Where's that girl that comes with you?" "I said, 'That's your daughter,' He didn't know what that was."

He had to learn to walk again, first with assistants at his side, then with a walker, and he still loses his balance occasionally. Yardley quit her Statehouse job — press secretary for Indiana Senate Republicans —  and moved back home (Middletown) to help care for her dad after he was released from the hospital. She landed a job closer to home, at Anderson University, her alma mater.

For six weeks or so before Collett had home health care, Judy would stay home with her husband during the day, then work nights and weekends at her job as a claims account manager while Yardley stayed with her father.

Collett didn't recognize his own mother. He didn't know what coffee or green beans were. He thinks iced tea, which used to be a favorite drink, tastes awful. 

Therapy is teaching him to count again, to string beads, and to remember some of the objects, like a horse and a dog, that he studies on a piece of paper for 10 seconds.

He and Judy shopped at a Meijer store recently. She started to return to a section of the store where she forgot to pick up something. "I said I'd go get it," Collett said. "They want me to do more stuff like that. I got down the aisle but instead of coming back … I got lost. I didn't know where I was at. I called her on the phone."

During an interview with The Star Press in a conference room, Collett was asked by his attorney to count to 30. He was able to do so slowly, pausing to concentrate between some of the numbers between 20 and 30.

His attorney asked if he remembered being in the Wapahani marching band. He didn't. She asked if he knew what a marching band was. He didn't. 

Judy and Collett ran into a self-service laundry owner who told Collett: "You are looking so much better. Before, you were staring forward and not communicating. Now you're looking healthy. You're a stud." Collett laughed, then asked, "What does that mean?"

"Everything I've got now is brand new to me," he told The Star Press. 

He did retain his sense of humor. "Even in the hospital he tried to be funny," Judy said. "Even though he didn't know anybody, he'd try to make the situation light."

After Judy had a long, stressful day, and she was getting ready to drive Collett home from a doctor's appointment, he said, "Do you want me to drive?" "She didn't catch it at first," he said, explaining the joke: "I don't know how to drive or where we were going."

A get-well card to Greg Collett from employees at the Muncie Rural King.

One of his former Rural King employees referred to Collett's sense of humor in a get-well card: "When a frequent slacker asked if they could take a 10-minute break, you held up both fists and said, 'I'll give you 10 — five and five."

Collett has spent nearly all of his adult life as a store manager, and he has loved it. First at Father and Son Shoes, aka Endicott-Johnson, at the Muncie Mall, where he was mall association president for a while. Then at a Taco Bell, a Lone Star Steakhouse, a Zoobies, a Skyline Chili, a Wendy's, and then general manager at the Rural King farm and home supply store in New Castle. After a heart attack, he was assigned to an assistant manager position at Rural King in Muncie.

"He gave more hours than required," Judy said. "All employees would attest to that. He loves the variety of the work, the interaction with employees, seeing a business do well and people do better and have customers come back. Instead of just employees, they were more like a family. It was a big part of his life  When he went to Muncie, some New Castle customers started shopping in Muncie."

In get-well messages to Collett, Rural King employees called him a kind, funny boss, a friend, "a rock on my hardest days," "Gregorous," a role model, and a father figure whom "I asked last week if you would adopt me as your 'work daughter.' "

Now seven months after he was attacked, Collett's family and police are asking the public to help identify the assailant. The family's lawyer came up with this description of the perpetrator:

Caucasian, heavy set, about 225-250 pounds, brown hair, about 5 feet, 7 inches tall, perhaps some balding on top, perhaps a goatee or beard, some mental and physical disabilities, distinct walk with his toes pointed outward, speech slurred and child-like, pinned to a brown jacket or hoodie were three police-like badges (two silver, one gold), cowboy or work boots, accompanied by two adults, one he referred to as "mom" (grey hair, estimated to be in her 60s), the other a man.

Police have added this to the description: appeared to be wearing glasses, believed to be in his late 20s to mid 30s, full beard and mustache at the time, one of the badges is a star.

Muncie police released this image from video surveillance of a man who accompanied a suspect in an attack at a Rural King store in Muncie on Oct. 26, 2016.

The police case might have remained closed if the victim's daughter had not, by chance, known somebody who knew somebody.

Louis E. Gerig is president of an Indianapolis public relations firm, a member of the board of trustees at Anderson University, a former assistant to Ronald Reagan's press secretary Jim Brady, and a former press secretary to Sen. Richard Lugar.

Gerig got to know Yardley when she was an intern on Mike Pence's gubernatorial campaign.

One day a month and a half ago, Gerig approached a friend named Linda Pence — an Indianapolis attorney unrelated to Mike Pence — after Gerig had run into Yardley.

"Would you please meet with this family?" Gerig asked Pence. "I've never seen Yardley like this. She looks hopeless. There is pain in her eyes."

Pence agreed to take the case without payment.

Yardley and Judy were discouraged that police had suspended their investigation. On the day after the attack, Yardley had gone to Rural King and asked them to save all video surveillance around the time of the incident (reported to 911 at 2:36 p.m. on Oct. 26). In the store, she saw the cane that had been used in the attack and was surprised police hadn't collected it as evidence.

Within days of the attack, Judy and Yardley visited city hall, where they obtained the initial police report and told their story to a victim advocate, who arranged a meeting with an officer. "That's how we got action from them to even look at it, because they said they took the report and just assumed he was hit on the head and would go back to work in a week or two," Judy said.

Attorney Linda Pence represents Greg Collett.

It appears to Pence that the officer who made the initial report took no further action. About three weeks after the incident, police told the Colletts that a detective was being assigned to the case. A detective did speak with Collett and his wife at some point and reported receiving incomplete information from Rural King, according to Pence. Later, the detective was re-assigned to a different job and removed from the investigation.

One of the first things Pence did was interview eight or nine Rural King employees, which is how she obtained a description of the attacker and what happened.

"Most were so happy because the ones that had seen him (the attacker) had never been interviewed by anybody," Pence said. "They were so happy that someone was there asking them what happened."

Muncie police seemed standoffish the first several times they were contacted by Pence, thinking she was planning to sue them, which she said she wasn't. She said she was trying to help them. 

On April 26, Pence tried police one last time, writing in an email: 

"I have sent multiple emails and requested that you contact me directly. No one has (other than Officer Ramsey with his file by email), and I’m not sure why.  A reporter is working on a story about Mr. Collett and his family. We hope to identify the subject.  

"Do you have interest in this matter going forward? Will I be allowed to view the video?  Can you send me a copy of it?  … If we receive any leads, do you want to be apprised? If so, who should I be contacting?"

Since then, Capt. Joe Todd re-opened the case and assigned it to himself.

"He's really on it," Pence said. "Captain Todd has got a couple of leads. He's been putting in that effort. The family's got to have him. Who else would arrest the guy?"

The cane on the right was used in the attack on Greg Collett.

The Collett family wants to know who did it and why, and to prevent it from happening to anyone else. "We need closure," Judy said. 

Pence's description of the suspect and interviews of employees were the breakthrough  in the case. Police already had watched the surveillance video (about six minutes of the front door was all they had) but didn't detect anyone who seemed to be intellectually disabled, which was about the only description they had.

Todd showed the video to one of the employees who had been interviewed by Pence. The employee picked the suspect out on the video, crying out, "You got him."

Todd told The Star Press, "You can see him and another person leaving the store."

Not long afterward, Rural King employees are seen rushing out the door looking for the trio.

The captain had photos of the suspect and of an adult male accompanying the suspect sent to local law enforcement agencies.

"Please view the attached images as it is very likely that someone in the law enforcement community knows this individual,"  Muncie police said in a message to the other agencies. "The subject in the brown coat was involved in an incident at Rural King in which he severely beat a manager, causing permanent and life-altering physical impairment."

That communication produced leads.

But the police investigation ran into HIPPA roadblocks, or federal regulations governing the disclosure of private health information by entities like Meridian Health Services and Richmond State Hospital who could have information about the suspect, Todd told The Star Press. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is better known as HIPPA.

If the suspect is found, he could end up at a psychiatric hospital rather than in the criminal justice system. If he is as handicapped as described by witnesses, "the prosecutor is never going to file a criminal case," Todd predicted.

One theory of police investigators is that the suspect is autistic. If so, and if he was, say, touched on the shoulder, even kindly, by Collett, that could have set him off, Todd said.

"The charging decision is made on the specifics of each case, but just like I would not file charges against a three-, four- or five-year-old … the special needs of that person would weigh heavily on whether or not I filed charges," Delaware County Prosecutor Jeff Arnold said.

The adults accompanying the person who attacked Collett, however, could face prosecution.

If a man with special needs committed battery and his parents or guardians whisked him away, "they may be looking at a problem," Arnold said. "They have a duty to assist the store manager and not assist a criminal event. If they witnessed it and ushered the child out, that's assisting, and I don't like that."

Meanwhile, Collett is not out of the woods. 

Greg Collett in a family photo taken before he was attacked.

The Star Press interviewed him on April 24. A week later, Pence reported he had been re-hospitalized.

"He woke up and could not recognize his wife Judy, daughter Yardley, where he was, how to brush his teeth," the attorney said in an email. "Began having seizures. Taken to Anderson ER where he seized 3 more times. This just keeps on getting worse."

But for now his condition has improved. He was sent back home and has been feeling better.

Report tips to Capt. Joe Todd (765) 747-4867 (ext. 270) and attorney Linda Pence (317) 833-1111.

Contact Seth Slabaugh at (765) 213-5834.