Monday September 8th, 2025 6:04PM

Police seek teenage girls in stabbing deaths of grandparents

By The Associated Press
<p>Two teenage girls wanted in the stabbing deaths of one of the girl's grandparents were captured by police along the Georgia coast on Tuesday.</p><p>Fifteen-year-old Holly Ann Harvey and 16-year-old Sandra Ketchum are charged in a warrant with killing Harvey's grandparents, Carl and Sarah Collier, both 77, at their suburban home about 15 miles south of Atlanta, authorities said.</p><p>Police apprehended the teens on Tybee Island, said Fayette County Sheriff Randall Johnson. They may be returned to the county as early as Tuesday night to face charges of two counts each of felony murder and two counts of malicious murder, he said.</p><p>The sheriff said the teens had abandoned the pickup truck they were driving and were found a few blocks away from the vehicle.</p><p>The Colliers were stabbed repeatedly with a large knife sometime after 6 p.m. Monday, sheriff's Sgt. Belinda McCastle said. Carl Collier was found in the kitchen, and Sarah Collier was in the basement.</p><p>Harvey had been living with her grandparents, McCastle said.</p><p>The Colliers were "hard-working, everyday churchgoing people" who had a lot of friends, Johnson said.</p><p>"I knew they had some problems with the granddaughter," Johnson said, declining to elaborate.</p><p>On Tuesday, the Collier's white-brick ranch house and front yard was surrounded by yellow police tape, spanning from the curbside mailbox to a telephone pole and neighbor's trees. Three officers were seen walking around the property and inside the house, which had a small American flag hanging outside the front door.</p><p>Neighbor Neoma Gaskins, who lives two doors down, said the Colliers had lived at the house for more than 30 years. She said Carl Collier was a retired Delta employee who had painted houses and Sarah Collier was a homemaker. She said she knew of some family problems with Harvey and her mother.</p><p>"Sarah had told her Sunday school class they were having trouble with Holly," Gaskins said.</p><p>After five members of the Ketchum family met with investigators Tuesday morning, a woman named Glenda who described herself as Sandra Ketchum's aunt stepped outside the sheriff's office and read from a written statement to television cameras.</p><p>"Sandy, please turn yourself in at the nearest police station," she said in a statement. "We, your family, do not understand your actions in the last 24 hours. Nor do we approve of them."</p><p>"Please know we love you and hope you make the right decision and face your life and come home," the woman said.</p><p>Rudolph Berthoud, a retired New York City police officer who lives near the Colliers' house, said he never expected to see a crime scene like this in his quiet neighborhood in north Fayette County.</p><p>"I lived with crime all my life, but it's always been on the outside," he said. "If you live enough, it catches up with you."</p>
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