In the early evening of October 13, 2016, the lives of two teenagers from Gary, Indiana, came to a violent and tragic end. Zantrell Collins, an 18-year-old male, and his girlfriend, 18-year-old Koreena Ramos, were discovered shot to death in a parked car. The owners of the Family Discount Foods on East 49th Avenue made the grim discovery as they were closing up for the night.
Both Collins and Ramos had sustained multiple gunshot wounds, and their deaths were quickly ruled as homicides by the Lake County Coroner's Office. The shocking double homicide added to what was an already violent month in the city of Gary.
The initial investigation into the murders of Zantrell Collins and Koreena Ramos was fraught with challenges. Detectives waded through a series of false leads and unreliable witness accounts that led them down frustrating paths. Early in the investigation, the name William Dejuan Antonio Galloway surfaced as a person of interest, but a lack of concrete evidence hampered any immediate progress. Investigators also learned that Collins and Ramos had a reputation for robbing people, a detail that suggested a possible motive for their murders but did little to immediately identify their killer. For years, the case grew cold, leaving the families of the two young victims without answers and a sense of justice.
A significant breakthrough in the case finally came in April 2020, years after the shooting. An inmate and former friend of William Dejuan Antonio Galloway, Nicholas Pelissier, came forward with information that implicated Galloway in the murders of Collins and Ramos. Pelissier, who was incarcerated with Galloway, provided a detailed account of the events of that fatal night in October 2016. Based on this new testimony, the Lake County prosecutor's office filed murder charges against Galloway, who was 27 years old at the time. U.S. Marshals arrested Galloway in November 2019 and he was returned to the Lake County Jail to await trial for the double homicide.
The legal proceedings against William Dejuan Antonio Galloway were complex and lengthy, compounded by his involvement in other violent crimes. A month after the murders of Collins and Ramos, Galloway was involved in another shooting that resulted in the death of Jonquell Golida and serious injury to another individual. While awaiting trial for the 2016 homicides, Galloway was convicted in 2021 for a separate incident of attempted murder and criminal recklessness that occurred in 2019, for which he received a 55-year prison sentence. In a turn of events, in August 2024, prosecutors made the decision to drop the murder charges against Galloway for the deaths of Zantrell Collins and Koreena Ramos, citing insufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. Galloway remains incarcerated for his 2021 conviction.
