Bowie State Student Richard Collins III Laid To Rest As UMD President Announces Anti-Hate Action Plan
Lieutenant Richard Collins III, who was killed on the campus of The University of Maryland College Park, was laid to rest on Friday. This comes days after his family posthumously accepted his diploma from Bowie State University.
Thousands honored Lieutenant Richard Collins III on Friday during a funeral service held at The First Baptist Church Of Glenarden.
Twenty-three-year-old Collins was fatally stabbed by a University of Maryland student who was a part of an “Alt-Reich” Facebook group. Collins, who was a Bowie State University student, died on Saturday in the possible hate crime.
Sean Christopher Urbanski was charged with the murder of Collins. As ThinkProgress writes, the Alt Reich group Urbanski was a member of — an online forum for racist and sexist memes and other inflammatory material — has since been deleted. Authorities said that the incident is being investigated by the FBI as a possible hate crime and that the attack was unprovoked.
According to WTOP, the University of Maryland President Wallace Loh has since outlined new anti-hate initiatives in the wake of last weekend’s fatal campus stabbing. The new initiatives includes establishing a hate-bias and campus safety task force, creating a rapid-response team and allocating $100,000 in supplemental funds to the Office of Diversity and Inclusion for supporting diversity and inclusion efforts.
“We all want a culture that rejects hate and forges a more perfect union in our nation’s rich multicultural and multiethnic diversity…But these are fraught times, on our campus, across the nation, and the world. It is on all of us to stand up and fight the racism, extremism, and hate that are cancers in our body politic,” Loh said.
Collins’ family accepted his diploma from Bowie State University on Tuesday, just days after the fatal stabbing.
Rev. Darryl Godlock, a spokesman for Collins’s family, stated that the 23-year-old was an “outstanding” and “highly intelligent” man who wanted to follow in his military father’s footsteps.
Richard Collins Jr., the victim’s father, told NBC 4 Washington that his son “prided himself on his time and in his ROTC unit on being the top runner in his PTs.”