Shabreon Lashay “Shay” Collins was a 25-year-old Black woman whose life was taken after gunfire erupted at her apartment in Dundee, Florida, late on the night of June 27, 2019. The shooting occurred at an apartment complex near Daniel Street, transforming what should have been an ordinary Thursday evening into the beginning of a homicide investigation that remains unresolved.
Although the attack happened on June 27, records from law enforcement and her obituary show that Collins died the following morning, June 28, after doctors attempted to save her life.
At approximately 10:20 p.m., the Polk County Sheriff’s Office Emergency Communications Center received a 911 call that disconnected before information could be provided. At nearly the same moment, a sheriff’s office lieutenant who happened to be in Dundee heard gunshots coming from the area of Daniel Street. Deputies were sent to the apartment complex and discovered Collins inside her residence suffering from a gunshot wound. The timing of the abandoned emergency call and the shots heard by the lieutenant brought officers to the scene quickly, but the person responsible had already escaped.
Emergency personnel treated Collins at the apartment before she was airlifted to Lakeland Regional Health Medical Center. She was reportedly conscious and talking when authorities first reached her, giving her relatives reason to hope that she might survive. At the hospital, she underwent surgery for the injuries caused by the shooting. Despite those efforts, the wound to her right shoulder proved fatal, and she died on Friday morning. Her family had spent the night waiting for encouraging news, even imagining that she would eventually emerge from surgery joking with them as she had before, only to learn that she was gone.
Investigators later described the killing as a home-invasion homicide. Reporting about the case indicated that Collins was shot through the front door of her apartment with a high-powered rifle. The circumstances suggest that the gunman fired from outside or while forcing entry rather than confronting her during a spontaneous argument inside the home. Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said the attacker’s face had been covered, preventing a straightforward identification, but he also suggested that people were talking and that detectives were continuing to gather information. Authorities have not publicly disclosed a confirmed motive or explained whether Collins herself was the intended target.
One area examined during the investigation involved Collins’s boyfriend at the time. Authorities said he had allegedly been selling marijuana from the apartment and was later arrested on unrelated drug and weapons charges. Despite that connection to activity occurring at the residence, law enforcement specifically stated that he was not considered a suspect in Collins’s murder. No publicly available information shows that he was charged with assisting the killer or participating in the shooting. The distinction was important because it left investigators searching for another person, or possibly more than one person, who had approached the apartment that night with a powerful firearm.
Collins’s death devastated her father, Ransie Collins, and her sisters, who later spoke publicly about the lasting grief left behind. Her father described losing interest in activities he once enjoyed and said that everything in his life had changed after the shooting. Her younger sister remembered experiencing a sudden pain in her chest when she learned Collins had been shot, while another sister recalled sensing that Collins was slipping away before the helicopter carried her to the hospital. More than a year after the killing, the family continued pleading for the shooter to surrender and for anyone who knew what happened to stop protecting the person responsible.
The Polk County Sheriff’s Office and Heartland Crime Stoppers initially publicized a reward for information, and Sheriff Judd later increased the amount from $10,000 to $15,000. The reward was offered for information leading to the arrest of the suspect or suspects responsible for the murder. Investigators believed someone in the community might recognize the circumstances of the attack, know who possessed the weapon, or have heard the killer discuss what happened. The sheriff indicated that detectives were making progress, but authorities did not announce an arrest or publicly identify a person of interest.
As of the latest information published by the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, Collins’s homicide remains listed among the agency’s cold and unsolved cases. No suspect has been formally named, no arrest has been reported in connection with her death, and there have been no resulting criminal charges, trials or convictions. Her case continues to rest on the possibility that a witness, associate or person with secondhand knowledge will provide the evidence needed to identify the masked shooter and explain why gunfire was directed through the door of her home.
The unanswered questions have left Collins’s family with a painful divide between what is known and what remains hidden. They know when the gunfire sounded, where she was found and how desperately medical personnel tried to keep her alive. They know the attacker concealed their face and used a weapon capable of firing through the apartment door. What they still do not know is who carried out the attack, whether Collins was deliberately targeted, whether another person was the intended victim, or who may have helped the gunman flee. Until those answers emerge and an arrest is made, the death of Shabreon Lashay Collins remains an open wound for her family and an active cold-case homicide in Polk County.
