At this point, local law enforcement knew how to handle Robbie when he was in an anxious spell. Stalder, the police chief, told me that, during calls to Robbie’s apartment, officers stood outside the door and talked in a gentle voice until he calmed down. The department had a be-on-the-lookout alert set up for Robbie’s vehicles, so officers would know to respond with calm in the event of a traffic stop. “Because of the officers’ abilities to create that space and that time, things worked out,” Stalder said.
In November, 2018, Robbie drove his Ranger west on Grand Avenue, a commercial area near the university. He was travelling significantly under the speed limit, and soon a patrol vehicle from the sheriff’s office pulled in behind him. Robbie moved into the left lane, then turned across traffic, flipping on his signal a few seconds late. The patrol car followed. Robbie turned again, this time without a signal. The patrol car flashed its lights, and they both pulled over. Robbie was about a hundred yards from home.
Derek Colling is trim and muscular, with a blond crew cut that was, that day, covered by a dark beanie. He strode toward Robbie’s car. In college, Colling had been a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound football player, and he still maintained an athletic build, training regularly in a form of martial arts called Krav Maga, developed for the Israeli military. When he reached the passenger’s side of the car, he told Robbie to roll down the window. Robbie refused, and pointed to his apartment building, which was visible across the street. Colling demanded again, and Robbie’s responses turned agitated. Then he started the car, and pulled away. (For someone fleeing the police, he drove slowly; before turning into his apartment’s parking lot, he used his turn signal.) Colling ran to his cruiser and followed in pursuit, calling for backup. Robbie parked next to his apartment, at the end of the parking lot, and got out. Officers trained in responding to calls involving people experiencing mental-health crises are taught how to speak in a calm voice and maintain distance. Colling pulled up quickly, pinning in Robbie’s truck and leaving him effectively cornered.
Colling pulled out his Taser and pistol and yelled, “Get your hands up now!” He approached, weapons drawn, closing the space between them. “Get your hands up now,” he repeated. He then deployed the Taser: its barbs stuck in Robbie’s shirt but didn’t appear to take effect. “Don’t shoot at me,” Robbie said. Colling tried again. Robbie covered his head, cursed, and charged. As the men grappled, Colling fired his pistol, and Robbie fell. Colling called for medical assistance, and held Robbie’s body to the ground. (He would later say that he still considered Robbie a potential threat.) With the assistance of a responding officer, he handcuffed Robbie, who lay bleeding. Another officer arrived and administered CPR. Colling had shot Robbie three times, including in the back. An ambulance transported him to a hospital. Hinkel arrived shortly afterward. In the lobby, she was informed that her son was dead.
Six days later, a vigil for Robbie was held at the Laramie skate park. More than a hundred people came to light candles. Later, at the memorial service, a friend of Robbie’s from the skate park delivered a eulogy, and Hinkel gave a short speech. She thought that more of Robbie’s friends might speak. But, she said, “They just couldn’t. They were just so angry.”
Hinkel walks quickly, and often wears a grin that conveys preparedness rather than joy. Following Robbie’s death, his older brother, Randy, tried to avoid returning to Laramie. Hinkel left frequently, to escape, but always returned home. “I don’t know how my mom does it,” Randy said. “She can’t go to the grocery store without someone wanting to talk about it.”
A deeply spiritual person, Hinkel felt that her son’s death had happened for a reason, and that some change should come of it. But she also tended to be trusting of local authorities. In the press, she praised O’Malley and Peggy Trent, the county attorney, with whom she was friendly. She told the Boomerang that her son’s death was the fault of “one police officer and not the whole force.” When the state announced that its Department of Criminal Investigations (D.C.I.) would conduct an inquiry into the shooting, she trusted that the system would deliver justice.
But others had started to organize around the shooting. After hearing about Robbie’s death, a graduate student named Karlee Provenza decided to start an advocacy group, which came to be called Albany County for Proper Policing (ACoPP). Twenty-four people showed up to the first meeting, which Provenza held at her house, a one-story home on Laramie’s west side, with a porch decorated by deer skulls. She served deer chili. One of Robbie’s uncles attended; Hinkel did not.
The week after Robbie’s vigil, Trent arranged a private viewing of Colling’s dash-camera and body-camera footage for Robbie’s family, including Hinkel, Ramirez, and their children Randy and Robyn. O’Malley was there, too. He cried as the tape rolled. “I felt bad for the family,” he told me later. Robyn hugged him and told him that she did not blame him for Robbie’s death. Randy felt different. “You did this,” he said to O’Malley. Hinkel left the room.
Trent eventually decided to gather a grand jury to determine whether Colling should be charged with a felony. Grand juries almost always convene in the absence of a judge or defense counsel, giving the prosecutor great influence. According to Kate Levine, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, prosecutors often present exculpatory information during cases involving law-enforcement officers. “This is part of that careful, balanced presentation that is absolutely just never done for anyone but police officers,” Levine told me. Prosecutors have an incentive to maintain a good relationship with the police department, since they depend on the coöperation of law enforcement to build other cases, and jurors tend to trust and sympathize with law enforcement. Courts grant officers significant leeway in use-of-force cases: if officers who claim self-defense can demonstrate that they feared for their life or someone else’s, they can almost always avoid conviction. Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia, said that the legal standards “are mostly vague. And so they give a lot of room for officers who perceive a threat to use force.”
Shortly before the grand jury convened, Hinkel attended a community forum, where she finally met Provenza. They discussed the upcoming grand jury, which would convene under seal, concealing the proceedings from public scrutiny. Provenza was concerned that, if the grand jury declined to indict, it might create the impression that Robbie’s killing had been justified. “Debbie kind of brushed it aside,” Provenza told me. “Then, I think, she watched it happen.”
The grand jury, which met in January, 2019, was tasked with determining whether to indict Colling on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. Trent presented jurors with evidence that had been gathered by the D.C.I. Prepared by multiple investigators, including Tina Trimble, who was also the president of the Wyoming Fraternal Order of Police, the D.C.I. report provided a menacing portrayal of Robbie, noting that his apartment was extremely dirty and suggesting that he had not been taking his medication. (The report wasn’t released publicly until months later, under pressure from news outlets including the Boomerang and WyoFile, a nonprofit that has covered Robbie’s case extensively. Through a supervisor, Trimble declined an interview request.) The report briefly covered Colling’s two previous shootings, but it failed to mention his firing from the Las Vegas police department.
In an interview with Colling, which investigators waited to conduct until four days after the shooting, he claimed that he had not recognized Robbie during the encounter. But he also suggested that he had heard enough stories about Robbie’s past to consider him dangerous, providing secondhand accounts of encounters between Robbie and law enforcement that took place years before he joined the sheriff’s office. Only after Colling viewed body-camera footage did he come to the conclusion that Robbie might have been holding a key during their scuffle. “Colling remarked that he never saw the keys,” Trimble wrote, “but that he felt like it was an ‘edged weapon’ after viewing the video.”
The jurors listened to Colling’s interview, and to testimony from Trimble and from a use-of-force expert who has defended police officers in misconduct cases. One of the members of the grand jury told me that the group was instructed not to consider Colling’s history. (Later, in a press conference, Trent said that presenting the facts of Colling’s prior shootings would have taken away “the relevancy of the facts of the case.”) Much of the testimony, the juror said, “was framed in a way to say that law-enforcement officers had this different standard applied to them because of the parameters of their occupation.” The juror added that, for a charge to stick, “I feel like they have to scream out, ‘I’m going to kill you on purpose and I don’t care.’ And it has to be on camera.” (Trent said that she could not discuss the details of the grand jury, beyond her public comments.)
After three days of proceedings, the grand jury declined to indict Colling. O’Malley later moved Colling to an investigative role. Hinkel felt betrayed. “The whole good-ol’-boy aspect of protecting somebody who’s done something like that is totally confusing to me,” she said. She reconnected with Provenza, who was trying to get the county commissioners to establish a community oversight board for the sheriff’s office. Hinkel was impressed by Provenza’s persistence in a state where aggressive reform efforts are not the political norm. (In February, a former Albany County attorney wrote to Provenza, in an e-mail, “You should exercise caution in your efforts. The people you are challenging have the power of the entire state government to bring against you.”) Hinkel and Provenza discussed policing issues and decided to start working together on advocacy. In May, Hinkel wrote an op-ed that criticized O’Malley and the law-enforcement system: “Perhaps we need to look at de-certification of these officers so they do not continue to have opportunities to injure or kill citizens.” Provenza soon started gathering signatures on a petition that called for Colling’s decertification.
In Wyoming, as in many other states, decertification decisions are handled by the state’s POST commission. (Most POST agencies were established following the civil unrest of the nineteen-sixties, when authorities in cities across the U.S. responded to civil-rights protesters with military tactics.) In January, 2020, Hinkel and Provenza drove seventy-five icy miles north to a diner in Wheatland, where they met Chris Walsh, the director of the state’s POST commission. Provenza presented Walsh with a petition for Colling’s decertification, which had nearly thirteen hundred signatures.
Typically, decertification cases are brought by police chiefs or sheriffs themselves. “The very people deciding whether to hire wandering officers are the people who need to decide whether to discipline them,” Ben Grunwald, the legal scholar, told me. But in Wyoming, citizens can file a grievance directly to the POST commission. At the end of the meeting with Walsh, Hinkel filed a written complaint. Walsh began an investigation.
In April, Provenza announced that she was running as a Democrat for a seat in the legislature. Hinkel helped with the campaign, writing postcards to voters. A few weeks later, George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white officer with eighteen prior complaints on his record. Protests erupted across the country, including in Laramie, where they attracted a diverse and durable crowd. Provenza attended, collecting more signatures for the decertification petition. Hinkel struggled to watch the video of Floyd’s death, and the similarity of the officers’ names—Derek Colling, Derek Chauvin—disturbed her. “Too many synchronicities,” she told me.
She left town to go rafting in Oregon. When she arrived home, in June, hundreds of people were marching in the streets, many of them chanting her son’s name. The marches continued daily. (Laramie police officers later arrested protesters for disorderly conduct and, in one case, “amplified noise,” even as counter-protesters in trucks with modified exhaust systems blasted them with diesel smoke.)
