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They were the words of a guilty man looking at a lifetime in prison.

Nevertheless, Thunder Collins, convicted Monday on first-degree murder and felony assault charges by Douglas County jury for his role in an Omaha drug deal gone fatal, blamed his fate, in part, on being a famous – albeit thoroughly average – Nebraska football player. Collins was an I-back for the Huskers in 2000, 2001 and part of 2002, when he decided to quit the game to take care of his younger brother.

“I always feel like, being a Husker at Nebraska, there’s a double standard,” Collins said. “We have our ups and downs. We get away with a lot of things. Sometimes we get hit harder with things. In this case right here? My name convicted me. If I was any other Joe Blow, I feel I would have beat this case…the media slanders me to sell newspapers.”

It was the end – for now – to a bizarre case.

Collins was arrested last year after the Sept. 23, 2008 shooting death of 38-year-old Timothy Thomas The day of the shooting, a television station, acting on a tip, called Collins’ cell phone. He answered, and said he wasn’t at the scene, that he was, essentially, just walking around town.

The trial began in early August, and quickly devolved into he said/he said case, where prosecution witnesses and Collins’ defense team told entirely different versions of the shooting. The six-man, six-woman jury believed the prosecution, and now Collins is looking at a mandatory life sentence for the murder charge, and 170 years on top of that for the other charges. Collins was not convicted of shooting Thomas, but of being in the garage at the time of the murder, and that murder taking place during a robbery.

“Are you happy? Are you happy?” Collins yelled at the jury as he left the courtroom. “You know I didn’t kill anyone!”

Collins later said in an interview that he was angry because he saw jurors crying, which led him to believe they were unsure of their verdict.

In the hall, he screamed: "I got my dignity, I got my respect. I can come back to California cause I'm not snitching on nobody. I will get another trial!"

Collins did not testify at his own trial. But he testified, in a sense, to reporters after the verdict in a 20-minute interview. He said he was at the drug deal because he thought he was going to see a car. He said he had no gun. He said he ran away from the scene after getting in a fistfight with Thomas.

He said he knows who did kill Thomas, but isn’t going to give up the name. Because “I’m no snitch,” Collins said, the police had “tunnel vision on me.”

When pressed on why he refused to tell the police who he saw as the shooter, Collins said: “If I didn’t do anything then I don’t have to worry about anything.” Later, he challenged a reporter: “How do you know I haven’t said anything?” insinuating the police ignored information Collins gave to them. Collins said the two lead detectives on the case were “probably giving each other high fives” and were, in his view, caught in “several lies” on the stand.

Collins plans an appeal.

“A different group of jurors and a different court,” he said.

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Former Nebraska I-back Thunder Collins, brought up on murder and weapons charges following an incident in September, called the Omaha World-Herald from the Douglas County Correctional Facility to get out "his side" of the story.

Here's what he had to say.


Take from it what you will and be civil in the comments.

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