OPA-LOCKA, Fla. – Amanda Collins was just 37 years old when she was killed in May 2022. Her body was discovered by police days later, partially nude and decomposing in an Opa-locka canal.
More than a year later, Miami-Dade police have her accused killer — her then-boyfriend — back in South Florida, charged with her murder.
Recommended Videos
According to an arrest warrant, Opa-locka police found Collins’ body May 5 after someone discovered it floating in a canal off Burlington Street and Northwest 22nd Avenue. Partially-nude from the waist down, she had a bag placed over her head and a white bed skirt sheet wrapped around her lower body.
Investigators learned through Collins’ mother that her daughter had been in an online relationship with Xavier West for two years before West moved in with her and her daughter in the Pasco County city of Port Richey in March 2022.
During that time, Collins’ mother said West was “extremely violent,” in one case discovering the then-31-year-old smothering her daughter with a bedsheet, the warrant states.
Police said Collins’ mother eventually kicked the two out on April 12. Collins told her mother that she was moving in with West in Miami-Dade County.
The last time she would hear from Amanda would be April 30.
Police said just after 11 p.m. on May 1, surveillance video captured two men getting out of a Toyota Corolla, removing Collins’ body from the trunk and dumping her in the canal.
They said those men would turn out to be West and then-22-year-old Klauss Antony Moise.
According to the warrant, prior to dumping Collins’ body, West had driven to Moise’s Opa-locka home on a scooter, contacted another man using Moise’s phone and, soon, a man and woman would turn up in the Corolla.
Moise told investigators that the group went to West’s home on Northwest 133rd Street, in Miami-Dade County’s Westview area, and went to a shed, where he saw Collins’ body lying on the floor.
The woman told police that Moise had paid her to “transport an unknown object” and, while in the car with the other man, saw West and Moise place the wrapped object in her trunk.
They would then have her drive to the canal, police said. The other man told police that while in the car, he saw Moise and West remove the object from the trunk and walk towards the canal.
According to the warrant, the man heard a “splash” and overheard the pair talk to one another about “plac(ing) the bricks on top of it to weigh it down.”
Police said the four went back to Moise’s home and went their separate ways.
West would later be arrested in Pasco County on May 17 on a domestic battery by strangulation charge, prior to his extradition to Miami-Dade County on a second-degree murder charge Tuesday.
He’s being held without bond in the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center as of Thursday afternoon.
Moise was arrested in Nov. 2022 on a charge of accessory after the fact and would later be sentenced. He is on supervised release from the Florida state prison system, according to prison records.