Monday September 8th, 2025 6:12PM

Police seek teenage girls in stabbing deaths of grandparents

By The Associated Press
<p>Police were searching for two teenage girls wanted in the stabbing deaths of one of the girl's grandparents.</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>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 teens are charged with two counts of felony murder and two counts of malicious murder, McCastle said.</p><p>The girls were believed to be driving the Colliers' dark blue 2002 Silverado sports utility vehicle. McCastle said the girls might be headed south to Florida or toward the Carolinas. Authorities would not elaborate on why the girls might be headed to those states.</p><p>The Colliers were "hard-working, everyday churchgoing people" who had a lot of friends, Fayette County Sheriff Randall 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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