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Latonya Collier, Indianapolis, gets her first
looks at the electric chair that executed her great-great-grandfather in 1914. (Photo: Mike Fender/The Star) |
Latonya Collier walks quietly down the long hallway, the click of her heels echoing the last few steps in a 10-year journey of self-discovery.
The Indianapolis woman moves slowly, almost apprehensively, through the windowless passage leading to a small room in a training center just outside the razor-wire fence that surrounds New Castle Correctional Facility.
Reaching a heavy steel door at the end of the hall, Collier stops. She exhales and draws in a deep breath. Then she pushes through the door.
Tears well in her eyes.
There, only a few feet in front of Collier, is the killer of a member of her family: Indiana's electric chair.
The once-prolific killing machine is the most tangible connection yet to Collier's great-great-grandfather, Robert Collier. A century earlier, shortly after midnight on Oct. 16, 1914, Robert Collier became the first black man to be executed in Indiana's then-new electric chair.
His execution was something that few in Collier's family knew about or spoke of, yet Robert Collier had come to be a central character in Latonya Collier's life over the past decade. A jackhammer operator and college student, she had stumbled onto her great-great-grandfather's role in Hoosier history.
She learned that Robert Collier had killed a white police officer and claimed to have helped build the electric chair while an inmate at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City.
Latonya Collier would go on to discover much more about Robert Collier — and about herself — as she continued to dig into his long-forgotten, troubled past.
Source: IndyStar, Tim Evans, June 21, 2014