Man sentenced for stabbing homeless man and attacking him with a skateboard
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IDAHO FALLS – A local man has been sentenced for the stabbing and beating of a homeless man last July.
Collin Mclemore, 24, was sentenced by District Judge Dane Watkins Jr. to a minimum of one year and a maximum of 7 years in prison with pre-sentence credit for time served. Mclemore has been in jail since Sept. 26.
Mclemore was initially charged with felony aggravated battery.
In December, a plea agreement was reached where Mclemore agreed to plead guilty to the felony if another pending case against Mclemore was dismissed. He was charged with possession of a controlled substance in that case.
In July 2022, Idaho Falls Police were called to an area on the west side of Idaho Falls after reports of a stabbing.
Officers say that a man walked into road construction claiming he had been stabbed and had “blood coming from his chest.”
When officers arrived, they saw a man sitting on the curb. He told police he was homeless and officers noticed a “3/4th inch puncture wound to the right breast” and “two lacerations to his head.”
The victim said he was walking along the road when he started toward a white Chevrolet Tahoe.
He asked the people in the car for a lighter, and they said no. The victim told police that he then walked away, set his backpack down by a telephone pole, and continued to walk along the riverbank.
According to court documents, he returned to retrieve his backpack and saw it was gone. While looking for his backpack, he “came across a small homeless encampment along the road edge about 10 yards from the telephone pole.”
As he walked toward the camp, the victim said a “younger white man with thin hair and thin facial hair began to yell at him, ‘Get out of my campsite.’”
The man, later identified as Mclemore, hit the victim repeatedly over the head with a skateboard. According to the police report, the two men began fighting and the victim “felt that he was stabbed.”
The victim then ran north until he found help at a construction site, where police were finally called.
Officers later searched the homeless camp and found two small tents that appeared abandoned. During their search, they found a small lunch pail in one of the abandoned tents with paperwork inside belonging to Collin Mclemore.
The officer searched Mclemore’s name and after seeing his driver’s license photo, recognized that he matched the description from the victim.