UPPER MARLBORO, Md. (AP) — A white man was found guilty of a murder charge on Wednesday for stabbing a black college student to death at a bus stop on the University of Maryland’s campus, a crime that prosecutors had claimed was racially motivated.
Sean Urbanski, 24, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He is scheduled to be sentenced April 16.
A Prince George’s County jury deliberated for about two hours before finding him guilty of first-degree murder in the May 2017 killing of Richard Collins III, 23.
Supporters of Collins’ hugged after the verdict, while Urbanski’s mother leaned over and wept.
On Tuesday, Circuit Court Judge Lawrence Hill Jr. agreed to throw out a hate crime charge against Urbanski before jurors began deliberating. The judge ruled that prosecutors didn’t meet their legal burden of showing racial hatred motivated Urbanski to stab Collins.
A prosecutor, Jason Abbott, said a toxic mixture of alcohol and racist propaganda emboldened Urbanski to act on his hatred of black people. Urbanski had saved at least six photographs of racist memes on his cellphone and liked a Facebook group called “Alt-Reich: Nation,” according to prosecutors.
Urbanski, who had been enrolled at the University of Maryland’s College Park campus, didn’t deny that he stabbed Collins. But one of his lawyers said there was no evidence that the killing was racially motivated or that Urbanski hated or advocated violence against any ethnic group or race.
Collins was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army shortly before his death and was preparing to be deployed to the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea. He was days from graduating from Bowie State University, a historically black college, and was celebrating with a friend at bars near the University of Maryland’s College Park campus on the night of his killing.
Urbanski also had been out drinking with friends that night. Defense attorney William Brennan said an expert witness for the defense concluded that Urbanski’s blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit at the time of the killing, making him too drunk to have the intent or premeditation necessary to support a first-degree murder conviction.
It was just after 3 a.m. on a Saturday when Urbanski approached Collins while he waited for an Uber driver with a friend, a white man, and an Asian woman whom they met at the bus stop. Urbanski had watched them for more than 10 minutes before he briefly left and then returned, brandishing a folding knife as he approached the friends from a wooded area, according to Abbott.
“Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you,” Urbanski told them, according to police.
“No,” Collins said before Urbanski stabbed him once in his chest.
Abbott said Collins had his hands in his pockets when Urbanski attacked him without any provocation.
Police arrested Sean Urbanski at the bus stop, 50 feet from where Collins was dying. After fatally stabbing Collins, Urbanski folded the knife, clipped it onto his pocket and sat down on a bench until police arrived, Abbott said.
Defense lawyers failed to persuade the judge to exclude the racist memes and Facebook group as trial evidence. One of the memes “advocates violence against blacks,” while another has an image of a noose, a handgun and poison, a prosecutor said.
During a hearing in June, Brennan cited a New York Times article in which an administrator of the Facebook group said it was satire.
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