Funeral services and memorial celebrations for a Yorba Linda skater nicknamed “Jules” have been held or planned, but a different kind of gathering of family and friends is scheduled this evening in Brea.
They are meeting in front of the police station there to demand answers as to why an officer killed Julian Stanley Collender.
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Three people inside a car were robbed at gunpoint around 8:15 p.m. June 29 in the
parking lot of the Mercado Del Rio shopping center on La Palma Avenue and Weir Canyon Road in Yorba Linda.
One victim recognized the gunman, and officers from the Brea Police Department, which patrols Yorba Linda, arrived at the home of Collender's parents in the 24000 block of Avenida de Marcia just before 12:25 a.m. June 30.
Officers waited outside until 25-year-old Collender, who had reportedly been fingered as the gunman, arrived outside the residence.
Here's where it gets murky: cops say Collender “confronted” the officers before one shot was fired into the suspect's stomach.
He later died of that single gunshot wound at a local hospital.
As is routine, the Orange County District Attorney's Office is now investigating the officer-involved shooting.
Richard Collender, the father of the deceased, has already reached a conclusion: he alleges police murdered his son.
The father, who was home at the time of the shooting, claims Jules had just got out of a car and was running away when an officer fired the fatal round.
A police spokesman earlier said he did not know if the dead young man was armed or why the unidentified officer shot him.
Collender's family still does not have answers to those questions and many others they have about the incident.
“We have no idea and no information,” James Collender, Jules' 32-year-old brother, tells the Los Angeles Times. “We're hurt and
lost; we feel like it's a violation.”
Asked by the Times if he thought his brother had been wrongfully accused of
the robbery, James replied, “I think there's a lot more to the story.”
What the family does know is Jules was a Santiago Canyon College student who wanted to study filmmaking at Cal State Fullerton or Cal State Los
Angeles.
He liked to hang out at Brea's Liberty Boardshop, which posted the following on its website and Facebook page:
It is with great sadness to report the passing of skateboarder and
friend Julian (Jules) Stanley Collender, age 25.All of us here at Liberty Boardshop would like to express our
condolences to the Collender family.We'll miss you Jules.
The shop also announced it will be organizing a small memorial event in the
next few weeks, on a date to be announced.
In the meantime, there is the vigil at 5:30 this evening outside the Brea Police Station–and the ongoing quest for more answers.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.