On Thursday, Texas State District Judge Kathleen Hamilton issued a ruling that the man who was charged when he was a teenager of dousing a boy with gasoline and setting him on fire can now be tried for murder. Fox News said 28 year-old Don Willburn Collins was named by Robert Middleton in 1998 as the one who poured gasoline on him and set him on fire on his eighth birthday. Collins, who was 13 at the time he allegedly attacked Middleton, spent several months in juvenile detention but was released after prosecutors failed to gather enough evidence to pursue a case against the teenager.
Fox News said that the case against Collins was reopened when a videotaped deposition by Middleton revealed that the former had sexually abused the victim two weeks before the attack. Middleton reportedly succumbed to skin cancer as a result of the injuries he obtained from the gasoline dousing incident.
Hamilton's ruling will have prosecutors working double time to gather evidence to pin the allegations on Collins. Prosecutors might use part of Middleton's taped deposition, as well as testimonies from several witnesses who received a confession from others or Collins himself regarding his responsibility for the attack. The deposition and the testimonies were all heard during the hearing that decided the state's intention to convict Collins of his alleged crimes in the past.
Fox News noted that one of the witnesses who testified in the hearing was another victim of Collins. The witness claimed that he was also sexually assaulted by Collins when the former was 8 years old and was threatened to be burned by the latter if the witness told anybody about the assault.
E. Tay Bond, Collin's attorney, challenged the state court's decision to try his trial and insisted that the state law in 1998 at that time indicated that a juvenile had to be at least 14 to be tried for a capital felony offense case when the juvenile reaches adulthood. The minimum age of the state law, said Fox News, has been lowered from 14 to 10.
