Dillon dog mauling case set for trial Monday

Monday, after two trial delays, Bentley Collins is set to once again appear in a Dillon courtroom to face an involuntary manslaughter charge and six counts of failing to confine dangerous animals.

Prosecutors set two separate trial dates for Collins in February 2008, but both were rescheduled, the second coming after a judge agreed to excuse Collins’ attorney from the case.

With a new attorney, the case against Collins is set to begin with jury selection Monday at the Dillon County courthouse.

On Nov. 3, 2006 medics found 10-year-old Matthew Davis dead in Collins’ Home Light Road driveway.

Davis’s mother, Caroline Davis, told News13 in 2006 that she knew something was wrong when her son was more than an hour late getting home after the school bus dropped him off at a friend’s home.

Matthew occasionally got off the bus at his friend’s homes and it wasn’t uncommon for him to walk home from there, Caroline said.

Davis said she and Dillon County deputies set out to search for her son that Friday night.

Initially, the search came up empty, “We went everywhere. Cops came up here and they talked a few minutes, told me to get in the car and show them the house that he was supposed to go to. They looked, we came by and they said stop at Collins’. We stopped there and my son was lying in the driveway,” Carolina Davis told News13 in a Nov. 4, 2006 interview.

Matthew Davis was pronounced dead by the county coroner shortly after.

Investigators said six pit bull mixed dogs, which belonged to Collins, attacked Matthew only feet from the front door of Collins’ home.

Collins told News13 he was not at home at the time of the attack and handed Dillon County investigators a video tape from a surveillance camera at his home to prove that, Collins said the day after the incident.

Investigators never said what Collins’ video tape showed, but authorities arrested Collins days later and charged him with the death and for not confining his dogs.

On Nov. 11, 2006 a Dillon County magistrate set Collins’ bond at $100,000 on the charges.

Collins told News13 in an interview days before his trial in Feb. 2008 that Matthew Davis spent days at his home, playing with his own children and with the same dogs investigators later said took Matthew’s life.

“Matt played with that youngest boy of mine on a regular basis. He came up there right regular and wanted to know if Taylor could come out and play. Him and that youngest boy of mine literally wore out a trampoline I had here at the time,” Collins said.

Collins said Dillon County investigators rushed to charge someone with the death and said his dogs never showed any aggression to Matthew or to his own children, “Never a bit of trouble out of them. They, him, and Taylor in particular, they’d run and play with those dogs and I’d get on them because those dogs would run up to them and lick them in the face,” Collins said.

Caroline Davis told News13 at Collins’ trial in Feb. 2008 that someone lured her son to the Collins’ home, “Matthew was innocent, he wouldn’t of went in that yard unless called up there. He was petrified of dogs.”

Jury selection will begin Monday morning and opening arguments could begin Monday afternoon.

If convicted, Collins faces six years in prison on the involuntary manslaughter charge and three years in prison on the confinement charges.

You can count on News13 to update the trial from inside the courtroom.