A mother of 3 is killed in a drive-by shooting Crystal Marie Collins, a 36-year-old Black woman from north Minneapolis, was killed on July 16, 2016, after a burst of gunfire shattered what had been an ordinary summer evening outside her home near 30th and Newton avenues North. Family members said she had just returned from a family gathering and was outside with relatives when shots were fired. Police responded to reports of gunfire around 8 p.m. and found her wounded on the ground; despite CPR efforts, she was pronounced dead at the scene.
The Hennepin County Medical Examiner later ruled that she died from a gunshot wound and classified the death as a homicide. She left behind three children, and relatives remembered her as joyful, loving, and the kind of person whose laugh filled a room. 
In the first days after the shooting, the details that emerged only deepened the sense of randomness and grief around her death. Reports said two other people were also hurt, and relatives insisted they did not know why anyone would have opened fire on the group. Public officials and family members alike said Crystal did not appear to be the intended target, a detail that made the killing feel even more cruel. Her daughter later spoke publicly about the family’s pain, and a month after the shooting her relatives were still pleading for answers, still trying to understand how a mother could be killed just feet from her own door. 
As investigators kept digging, the case took on the shape of a broader north Minneapolis violence story rather than a simple isolated attack. Reporting from the months that followed said detectives concluded that someone in the group Crystal was with had returned fire during the shooting. Some shell casings recovered at the scene were said to match cartridges found at another homicide from a parking lot gathering earlier that month, and other reporting described the shooting as believed to be gang related. Even with those leads, no publicly identified suspect was charged in connection with Crystal’s killing in the immediate aftermath, and one month after her death news reports still stated that there had been no arrests. 
The public record available online still points to a case without a named killer brought to justice. State and cold-case databases continue to list her homicide as unsolved, reflecting the bleak reality that for all the early theories about intended targets, retaliation, or gang ties, no publicly documented arrest, prosecution, trial, or conviction appears to have closed the case. What remains most visible in the reporting is the loss itself: a mother taken in front of family, children forced to live with that memory, and a neighborhood left with another story of gunfire that ended faster than anyone could make sense of it. 
