The suspect had been charged a day earlier in a decades-old child sexual abuse case.
BALA CYNWYD, Pa. — A woman whose allegations helped lead to child rape charges against a former suburban Philadelphia police officer said she felt anger and grief after authorities said the suspect was killed in a pre-dawn shootout with police before he could face a courtroom.
The man, identified by authorities as Francis Connell Collier, 38, died early Wednesday after officials said he fired at officers who approached him on Old Lancaster Road in Lower Merion Township. His death has left a criminal case built on long-ago allegations without a trial, while county detectives separately investigate the officer-involved shooting that ended his life.
Collier had recently been charged in a case stemming from accusations that he sexually assaulted two girls more than 20 years ago. One of the accusers, Tori Payne, said she came forward in December 2025 along with another female family member after describing years of abuse that she said began when they were around 5 and 6 years old. Payne said she had been preparing for the strain of a legal process and now has to confront a different kind of ending. “There was, you know, sadness, anger. Sadness mainly for my childhood self,” Payne said in an interview Wednesday night.
Authorities have said the alleged abuse occurred between 2001 and 2004. Charging documents tied the accusations to a period when Collier was a teenager babysitting in Drexel Hill, in Delaware County. Investigators said the case later moved to the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, which filed charges on Tuesday that included rape of a child and related offenses. The death of the defendant means there will be no criminal trial where evidence is tested before a jury, and there may be fewer public court filings than many victims expect when they first report abuse.
Payne said she decided to report the allegations after learning Collier had entered law enforcement and after seeing images of him around children. She said that discovery made her feel she had to act to protect others. “Once I saw him with children, it lit a fire in me that just told me that it was my due diligence to protect any future children,” she said. She also said she learned he had been assigned to a child abuse and exploitation task force, a detail that added to her concern and shaped how she understood the stakes of her report.
Officials have said Collier most recently served as a part-time officer with the Morton Borough Police Department. County officials said he served on a child abuse and exploitation task force from August 2022 to April 2023 and was removed for inactivity. After the allegations surfaced in December, Morton police placed him on unpaid administrative leave, and he resigned later that month. In a statement, the department said it was “profoundly disturbed” by the sexual abuse allegations, while also saying no allegations of criminal conduct had been made against him during his time with the department.
The events that ended Collier’s life unfolded around 3:48 a.m. Wednesday in Bala Cynwyd, near the campus of Saint Joseph’s University and close to busy commuter corridors that connect the Main Line to Philadelphia. Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele said township officers on patrol spotted a vehicle they believed belonged to Collier on Old Lancaster Road. The officers saw him returning to the vehicle and confronted him, Steele said. Collier fired at the officers, Steele said, and the officers returned fire, fatally wounding him.
Authorities have not said how many officers fired, how many shots were exchanged, or whether any officers were injured. A neighbor’s doorbell camera captured the sound of multiple gunshots, according to local reporting. Police spent much of the morning processing the scene, collecting shell casings, and towing the vehicle Collier was in at the time of the confrontation. Officials have not publicly described whether Collier was being actively stopped to serve a warrant at that moment or whether officers decided to approach him after recognizing his vehicle while on patrol.
The investigation into the shooting is being handled by the Montgomery County Detective Bureau, following a county protocol for officer-involved shootings. That process typically includes interviews, firearms and ballistics analysis, and review of available video from officers and nearby properties. Authorities have not announced when they expect to release a fuller account of what happened, and they have not identified the officers involved.
For Payne, the sudden end of the criminal case has brought a complicated mix of feelings, including gratitude that officers survived and frustration that she will not hear the suspect respond in court. “Sometimes I feel relief because it’s over and he’s gone,” she said, while adding that it was unfortunate he would not have to answer to the charges in a courtroom. She described bracing for the emotional weight of hearings and testimony, then learning that the legal path she expected would never happen.
As of Thursday, detectives continued to investigate the officer-involved shooting, and the status of the sex-crimes case remained tied to court procedures that follow a defendant’s death. The next milestone is the completion of the detective bureau’s review and a decision by prosecutors on whether and how to publicly summarize their findings.
Author note: Last updated February 26, 2026.