Neighbors shocked by suicide, video
Now-viral footage shows woman thought to be assault victim of Cypress resident
To residents in a quiet pocket of Cypress, Dennis Ray Collins was by all means an ideal neighbor lending a hand with car repairs and lawn mowing.
To law enforcement, the 49year-old man, new to a rental near Lake Conroe in Montgomery County, was believed to have abused his 32-year-old girlfriend captured in a disturbing security video during a dead-of-night escape from a home they shared. He took his own life on Wednesday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest.
Collins had a brush with the law nearly two decades ago when police in Houston arrested him for attempted sexual assault. He pleaded guilty and was granted a five-year probation on deferred adjudication, according to Harris County court records. Soon after his arrest, Collins and his then-wife moved into a rancher along River Pines Drive in Cypress.
A neighbor who knew Collins for a better part of 15 years learned Thursday evening of his his suicide — and the allegations that he sexually assaulted the woman from the surveillance footage.
“He was a nice guy to me,” Obed Esqueda said in his driveway.
“I knew (Collins’ ex-wife) and him got divorced but I never knew why,” Esqueda said, before quickly adding, “He’d cut my grass.”
Collins left the home about five years ago when he and his exwife divorced, the neighbor said. Before then, multiple neighbors said they never heard or saw any hints of domestic issues at the home. The ex-wife remained at the home until this month when she sold the property.
Esqueda said he last saw Collins about three months ago, when his ex-wife was preparing to move.
“She asked me to paint her house. She wanted to be out of here,” Esqueda said. “I’m divorced, too. I’m going to sell my house. Too many memories.”
Another neighbor, who asked to not be identified, said she often saw Collins at the home to visit his daughter.
The discovery of Collins’ body in bed by police around 11 a.m. Wednesday was due to the alarming content of text messages he sent his ex-wife before his death, according to a Montgomery County Sheriff ’s Office spokesman. She requested a welfare check out of concern that “he may have hurt himself.”
Collins’ ex-wife could not be reached for comment.
She believed his girlfriend was the woman in the surveillance footage that surfaced over the weekend, she told authorities.
The woman in the video was believed to be a victim of sexual assault, Lt. Scott Spencer said at a press conference Thursday afternoon. The seven-second clip distributed Sunday by authorities captured the woman ringing a doorbell around 3:30 a.m. Friday in the Sunrise Ranch subdivision about 50 miles north of Houston. She was wearing what appeared to be only a shirt and restraints on both wrists, which she identified to police as those used in “private intimate encounters.”
“She was in distress,” Spencer said. “The allegations are that she was tied up by Mr. Collins. She went to seek help.”
Internet sleuths speculated, as the video rapidly circulated on social media, that she was pregnant, but Spencer was unable to corroborate. He was also unable to say whether the woman was injured during her time with Collins.
“She’s pretty upset. She’s very distraught about this. She’s embarrassed, she’s upset, she’s in shock that it’s come to this,” he said.
After the woman escaped, she knocked on the doors of two neighbors but was unable to immediately find help, Spencer said. She returned to the home she shared with Collins and left the next morning for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. At no point, he said, was she prevented from leaving the home.
Detectives spoke to the victim — now safe and with family — and she identified herself as the woman in the doorbell video through evidence found at the couple’s home that only she would have known about.
Collins also penned a suicide note explaining the circumstances leading up to his death, but police did not elaborate on whether the surveillance footage prompted his decision to end his life.