A witness described two separate confrontations before David Collins Sr. was killed, helping jurors assess Richard Vanderhoek’s claim of self-defense.
VANCOUVER, Wash. — The murder case against Richard “Cole” Vanderhoek turned in significant part on what a neighbor said happened during roughly 40 minutes on a quiet Vancouver street: a fight, an apparent departure, a vehicle following one of the men and a later confrontation ending with David Collins Sr. fatally wounded in a driveway.
More than two years after that April 2, 2024, morning, a Clark County jury found Vanderhoek guilty of second-degree murder. The conviction rejected his contention that he acted in self-defense when he fired a bow at Collins, 42. The neighbor’s account was important because it placed events in sequence and offered evidence about whether the danger Vanderhoek described was still immediate when the fatal shot was fired. Investigators also documented injuries on Vanderhoek, making the case less about whether the men had fought than about what happened after the first physical confrontation ended.
The witness told investigators the disturbance was underway by about 6:05 a.m. near a residence in the 3200 block of Northeast Petticoat Lane. The two men were seen fighting in front of the property. Collins then walked away, according to reports based on the probable-cause declaration. The witness said the other man appeared to follow him in a white Toyota Sequoia. Authorities later said the two returned to the area, where another altercation developed. That break in the sequence gave prosecutors room to argue that Vanderhoek had shifted from defending himself during a fight to pursuing Collins after Collins had attempted to leave.
About 10 to 15 minutes after watching the men leave the immediate area, the witness heard another disturbance near the same residence. Reports describing the court documents said Collins was outside a chain-link fence while Vanderhoek was on the other side with a bow. The neighbor then heard a loud thump and saw Collins collapsing or lying in the driveway with an arrow wound to his chest. The account provided investigators with a witness who had observed both the earlier physical conflict and crucial pieces of the later encounter, rather than someone who had arrived only after the shooting.
Vanderhoek’s own actions supplied another part of the chronology. Shortly before 6:45 a.m., he called 911 and reported that he had shot another man with a bow and arrow after an altercation. Deputies responded to Northeast Petticoat Lane and found Collins dead. Vanderhoek told investigators that Collins had assaulted him and repeatedly asked deputies to document the injuries he said resulted from the fight. Reports describing the probable-cause declaration noted a visible injury on the left side of Vanderhoek’s face, scrapes on his chest and elbow and a complaint involving his mouth. He was transported to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries.
Those observations mattered because they provided support for at least one part of Vanderhoek’s account: a physical confrontation had occurred. What they could not establish was whether Collins posed an imminent threat when the arrow was fired. Vanderhoek reportedly told deputies that he had told Collins to stop assaulting him and later said he did not know what else to do. His defense argued at trial that the shooting should be viewed through that earlier violence. Prosecutors urged jurors to focus instead on the intervening movement away from the property, the vehicle pursuit described by the witness and the fence that separated the men during the final encounter.
The prosecution had signaled that theory from the beginning of the criminal case. At Vanderhoek’s first appearance, prosecuting attorney Luka Vitasovic argued that Vanderhoek had essentially “hunted down” Collins after the initial conflict, describing aggressive driving and a revving engine as Collins moved away. The statement was advocacy by the prosecutor and preceded any trial determination of guilt. Vanderhoek pleaded not guilty, and his defense continued to maintain that he had acted to protect himself. A judge set bail at $2 million, and the case remained pending for more than two years before jurors were asked to resolve the competing explanations.
By then, several facts that were unknown in the first hours after the killing had been formally established. The Clark County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim as David Joseph Collins Sr., 42, of Vancouver. The office classified his death as a homicide caused by the arrow wound. Investigators also learned that Vanderhoek knew Collins at least well enough to provide his first name and describe him as an acquaintance. Authorities did not publicly characterize the two as close friends, and available reporting does not establish a more specific relationship. That limited description is important because it prevents the case from being recast as a dispute between people with a documented relationship that the record does not support.
The eventual trial required jurors to separate evidence of the earlier fight from the legal justification asserted for the later shooting. A person can suffer injuries during one part of an encounter without that fact alone establishing that deadly force was justified at another point. The state emphasized the witness’s description of Collins walking away and the later physical separation created by the fence. The defense emphasized Vanderhoek’s injuries and his stated fear following the fight. The jury’s second-degree murder verdict showed that it was not persuaded that Vanderhoek’s use of deadly force was lawful under the circumstances presented at trial.
That decision gave the neighbor’s morning observations a significance that was not obvious when deputies first arrived. At the time, the witness was describing what had happened on an otherwise residential block: two men fighting, one leaving on foot, the other following in a vehicle, another disturbance and then a sudden fatal injury. In court, those details helped establish movement and elapsed time. They allowed prosecutors to argue that the confrontation had changed between its first and final stages. They also gave the defense evidence to confront rather than leaving the case dependent solely on Vanderhoek’s statements to police after Collins was already dead.
The killing also left a record outside the courtroom. Residents interviewed shortly afterward described their surprise at seeing a homicide investigation on Northeast Petticoat Lane. One longtime resident told local television reporters he had never encountered a bow-and-arrow killing in Vancouver. Those reactions did not determine guilt and were not evidence of what happened between Collins and Vanderhoek, but they illustrated how unusual the scene appeared to neighbors. Police initially blocked the roadway while investigators photographed the area and worked through the sequence that would later become the foundation of the prosecution.
Collins’ relatives later supplied a different kind of perspective. His sister, Sabrina Meyer, remembered a brother who regularly checked on family members and could make them laugh. She described preserving a voicemail in which Collins sang a birthday greeting in a high-pitched voice to her daughter. That memory stood apart from the legal questions surrounding the fight and the shot. It showed what disappeared behind the case’s procedural language: the man described in early police reports only as a 42-year-old victim and Vanderhoek’s “acquaintance” was also a brother whose voice remained saved by his family.
September reports said Vanderhoek’s sentencing was set for Sept. 30 following the guilty verdict. The publicly available material reviewed for this Nov. 7 update did not yield a reliable account confirming what occurred at that scheduled proceeding or the sentence, if any, imposed there. The confirmed record therefore ends here with Vanderhoek convicted of second-degree murder after a jury rejected the self-defense explanation that had defined the case since the morning Collins was killed.
Author note: Last updated Nov. 7, 2026.