Niko Kollias is lucky to be alive. The former University of Rochester football player is sharing his story of torture with ESPN, and the story is horrifying.
Kollias got caught up in a revenge attack for a drug deal gone wrong while he was enrolled at Rochester in 2015. He and a friend, who also didn’t have anything to do with the initial deal, were essentially lured into meeting two women, who led them to a group of men who physically, sexually and emotionally tortured the two Rochester football players until the police finally tracked them down.
An ESPN feature went into detail about the attack, which will also be featured in an E:60 on Sunday. The entire story is terrifying and extremely graphic, Kollias had his femur broken, was shot, and suffered multiple attacks from improvised weapons while the attackers took money from his bank accounts and threatened to kill him.
“They started shooting everywhere and putting the gun into our mouths and up to my skin and just shooting and pulling away at the last second. There were bullet casings flying everywhere. I’m not wearing a T-shirt, and all these casings are extremely hot, and we’re just flailing and they’re yelling at us to stay still.”
Kollias remembers grabbing his teammate’s hand and holding it. “I was pretty much fine with dying at that point.”
The story is also a look at the institutional failures of the University of Rochester and its football program, which looked the other way on the initial drug deal and attack that made Kollias’ attackers seek revenge. Another football player—Isaiah Smith—used a teammate’s apartment to set up a fake robbery of drug dealers to steal four pounds of marijuana.
Campus police knew about the attack and investigated, but they didn’t tell the people who actually lived in the apartment what happened in there.
Kollias considered one of the football players living in the apartment to be one of his closest friends on the team, close enough for that teammate to confide to Kollias that the “incident” occurred in his apartment but that “he didn’t know exactly what happened.” When the player had returned to campus, he told his friends, his room was blocked off with yellow police tape. Once inside, he found blood on the walls and his furniture in disarray. The player declined requests for interviews and, as a crime victim, requested that he remain anonymous.
Kollias says university staff quickly “reorganized the place” until “you couldn’t find a speck of blood” anywhere in the apartment. But the university did not move the students or, Kollias says, explain to them exactly what had happened in their apartment.
The story’s upsetting in a number of ways. The physical attacks are horrifying, and so is the university’s treatment of its own students, especially those who got caught up in a crime they quite literally knew nothing about.
