Former Arkansas state Rep. Austin McCollum has been charged with three felonies after his wife accused him in a court filing of a pattern of violent abuse, including telling her to kill herself and offering to fetch a gun when she described suicidal thoughts.
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Prosecutors formally charged McCollum, 35, with second-degree domestic battering, first-degree false imprisonment, and aggravated assault on a family or household member, all felonies, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. He was arrested on Aug. 1 and released the next day on a $10,000 bond.
McCollum has not publicly addressed the abuse allegations, and his criminal defense attorney, Shane Wilkinson, declined to comment on the claims in the petition. In an Aug. 12 filing, McCollum denied a separate claim in his wife’s divorce complaint that he had made her life intolerable, and he has filed his own counterclaim seeking a divorce.
In her petition for an order of protection, filed in Benton County Circuit Court in early August, Ragen Ashlee McCollum, 34, described her husband’s alleged response as she struggled with suicidal thoughts. When she told him she thought their children “would be better off without me,” he told her to “do it” and offered to get the gun, she wrote, according to the petition as reported by the Daily Mail.
McCollum had represented House District 8 in the Arkansas House since 2017 and was the Republican nominee for Benton County judge, the county’s top elected executive. He won the party’s nomination for the post earlier this year and faces no opponent in November, according to the Democrat-Gazette.
After the arrest, top Arkansas Republicans, including Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and House Speaker Brian Evans, called on McCollum to resign and to abandon the county judge race.
His campaign had leaned heavily on his family image, the Daily Mail reported, with photographs of McCollum alongside his wife, a fulfillment engineer at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, and the couple’s two young children. The couple lived in a farmhouse-style home valued at about $900,000 in Bentonville, and McCollum has since moved to a home valued at roughly $1.5 million in the same city, according to the Daily Mail.
Benton County Circuit Judge Xollie Duncan granted her a two-year order of protection on Aug. 25, barring McCollum from contact, the Democrat-Gazette reported.
The confrontation that led to McCollum’s arrest began after the couple returned home from a wedding, Ragen McCollum wrote in her petition.
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“We returned home from a wedding and Austin got mad and started throwing things at me,” Ragen wrote.
She alleged that McCollum trapped her in their bedroom, struck her with a wire hanger, threw her onto the bed and pressed both knees onto her back, then repeatedly slammed a door on her hand as she tried to escape. Investigators, in a probable cause affidavit, described him driving his knee into the back of her neck and restricting her breathing.
“There was blood everywhere and I couldn’t see,” the petition states. “He grabbed my hair and slammed my head to the ground multiple times.”
The attack stopped only when McCollum told her to clean up the blood, she wrote, and that was when she fled and called 911. Deputies who responded reported that McCollum appeared intoxicated and that he had blood on his arms and legs and injuries to his knuckles, according to the affidavit.
McCollum could face up to 10 years in prison on each of the battering and false imprisonment counts and up to six years on the aggravated assault count, the Democrat-Gazette reported.
McCollum resigned his House District 8 seat on Aug. 5, and a special election was set for Nov. 3 to fill the remainder of his term, which ends in January, the Arkansas Advocate reported.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. Help is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
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