A Coon Rapids man will spend decades in prison for fatally shooting an 18-year-old during a chaotic altercation between rival gangs in St. Paul in the spring of 2016.
Glen Dale Acon, Jr., 33, was sentenced in Ramsey County District Court Thursday to just over 36 years in prison for his role in the slaying of Bobby Davion Collins at Indian Mounds Regional Park on April 17, 2016.
Police found Collins unresponsive and bleeding, and he died of a gunshot wound to the head.
Both his mother and Acon’s mother spoke about the deadly consequences of gang violence at the sentencing hearing Thursday, according to Acon’s public defender, Gregory Egan.
Egan said Collins’ mother was also the first to comfort Acons’ mom when a jury found him guilty in her son’s death in May.
“The sense of solidarity and empathy between those two (women) is really what stands out the most to me in all of this,” Egan said after the hearing. “They both have seen the impact that gangs and violence and poor decisions by young men can have and they both understand how that gets magnified with guns… It’s really a tragic loss on a number or levels.”
Egan went on to say that he’s watched how guns have shifted the stakes over his years as an attorney.
“It used to be that these types of rivalries were settled through fist-fights, and while that is not ideal certainly, it’s better then what we see in these contemporary, sort of second-generation gangs,” Egan said. “Far too many people have guns now and guns elevate an already terrible situation and represent the difference between a broken nose and a dead body.”
The deadly dispute that killed Collins began shortly after 20-year-old Trebor Brooks, a suspected member of the gang Forever After Money, showed up at the park for a barbecue. While he was walking with his girlfriend, a group of men from a rival gang drove by in a black SUV and flashed gang signs at the couple, according to criminal complaints filed in the case.
The woman told police that shortly afterward a group of four men approached Brooks and that one of them, 19-year-old Rashawn Porter, started egging Brooks on to fight.
Nervous that her boyfriend would be jumped instead of allowed a fair one-on-one fight with Porter, she told officers she took out pepper spray and began screaming. The commotion led several other people in the park to come over to see what was happening, including Acon, who had been at the barbecue with the couple.
Initially, it appeared that people wanted to keep the fight between Brooks and Porter, but then 25-year-old Samuel Andrew McCormick pulled up his shirt to reveal he had a firearm, the complaint said. Acon then pulled out his own gun.
That’s when “all hell broke lose,” court records say.
At some point, Brooks reportedly grabbed or was given Acon’s gun and fired it toward the group, prompting several people to flee. Witnesses told officers they then saw Acon firing the weapon.
DNA samples later obtained from the gun matched Acon and he was subsequently charged with two counts of second-degree murder, three counts of committing a crime benefiting a gang and a sixth count of first-degree riot.
A Ramsey County District Court jury found Acon guilty on all counts in May.
Brooks was sentenced to just over a decade in prison for his role in Collins’ death.
McCormick was sentenced last month to five years in prison for illegally possessing a firearm.
Porter was sentenced to a year on one count of third-degree riot.
Collins had recently completed high school in a juvenile facility and was looking forward to college when he died, those who knew him said after his death.