Yarmouth Police last week arrested a transgender-identifying man, Deserai Collins, 33, after he allegedly stole a van in Portland, led law enforcement on a multi-town chase, and crashed into two police cruisers, injuring two officers.
The owner of Portland’s Pedego Electric Bike store reported the theft of one of his company vans on April 10, claiming it had been stolen overnight.
Yarmouth police officers eventually spotted the van driving north on Route 1. They attempted to stop the vehicle, but Collins allegedly refused to comply with the traffic stop instruction and instead escaped by driving the wrong way down a highway on-ramp.
Collins then allegedly stopped the van, and police attempted to arrest him again. According to the Yarmouth Police Department, Collins then intentionally slammed the van into the back of a police cruiser, almost hitting an officer.
He allegedly traveled through Freeport into Portland with police in pursuit and, once in Portland, drove into a second Yarmouth police cruiser. The driver eventually stopped the van on railroad tracks behind 58 Fore St., where he was arrested. According to police, two officers were injured during the arrest, with one injury requiring hospitalization, though the officer has since been released.
An employee of the bike shop claimed that the keys to the van had been stolen three months earlier during a break-in and suggested that the driver of the stolen vehicle and the person who originally broke into the shop could have been the same person.
Collins faces numerous charges, including reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon, theft by unauthorized use of property, and refusing to submit to arrest.
Maine news outlets uniformly referred to Collins as a woman and did not publish his mugshot, which makes it clear that he is male. The Portland Press Herald even avoided naming the suspect.
A Facebook account appearing to belong to Collins features only a few posts, some focusing on transgenderism. The account’s most recent post, from February 2022, seems to show that Collins was at that time homeless. It also accuses police officers of standing by while he was assaulted and claims that the officers were involved in some sort of nuclear experiments.
Collins also claimed that his neighbors were “implementing acts of negligence involving atomic physics later on leading to nuclear physics aswell [sic] as chemical warefare [sic] involving molecular biology and exposing me to high levels of radon and other chemicals that involved a furnace underneath my small bedroom with a L shaped pipe with the cap undone and placed up against my wood floor board.”
The Maine Wire received information suggesting that, prior to arrest, Collins may have been offering himself online as a transgender prostitute, which appeared to be somewhat supported by claims about his “confidential relations, some being political,” in his final Facebook post. His description aligns with that of an individual also named Deserai offering sexual services for hire on multiple websites, including one called “Erotic Monkey.”
Similarly, Collins’ description also aligns with a publicly available data breach notification submitted to the Maine Attorney General’s office in 2021, accusing the India Street Clinic in Portland of inadvertantly leaking his information and claiming that he was involved with the clinic to undergo testing for possible sexually transmitted diseases.
The Maine Wire was unable to entirely verify whether Collins was a transgender prostitute prior to his alleged joyride and arrest.
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