Frank Collins, a 94-year-old White male and U.S. Air Force veteran from Ellenwood, was killed on March 19, 2020, after a brutal home invasion at his house on River Road in DeKalb County. The attack unfolded at night, when intruders forced their way into the home, terrorized the people inside, and set off a chain of violence that ended with Collins mortally wounded. Early accounts described a scene of fear and confusion, with family members caught in the robbery as armed men demanded money. Collins, an elderly man using a walker, was pulled into the violence inside the place where he should have been safest.
In the first wave of reporting, the case carried the uncertainty that so often follows a killing like this. Police said multiple suspects were involved, and relatives believed the attackers may have known something about the home before they struck. The crime did not appear to be a random burst of violence. Instead, it looked like a targeted robbery that escalated into murder, leaving Collins’s family grieving not only the loss itself, but the cruelty of the way it happened. Public descriptions of the invasion painted it as especially callous because of Collins’s age and condition, turning the final moments of a veteran’s life into something violent and deeply traumatic for everyone in the house.
The case eventually moved beyond those early unanswered questions. In February 2024, Deonte Denard Sills was convicted by a DeKalb County jury in connection with the home invasion that led to Collins’s death. Prosecutors said the evidence tied Sills to the robbery and killing, and the jury found him guilty of malice murder along with other serious charges stemming from the attack. Authorities described the crime as a violent home invasion robbery that ended with Collins being thrown to the ground and fatally shot. The conviction gave the case a named defendant and a measure of accountability that had been missing in the immediate aftermath.
Even with that verdict, the story remains one of a peaceful home shattered by men who came in with force and left devastation behind them. Collins’s death was not just the loss of an elderly resident, but the killing of a man whose life had stretched through nearly a century and included military service, family, and a home in Ellenwood that became the setting of his final tragedy. What began as a robbery on River Road ended as a murder case that took years to reach a courtroom reckoning, with Sills ultimately convicted for his role in the invasion that killed Frank Collins.
