Last Week, Outlets Across Texas Used Variations Of The Following Headline: “Drug-Dealing White Supremacist Stripper Sentenced For Obstruction Of Justice.”

Were 2020 not clearly the Darkest Timeline, this headline — or any of the slight variations we’ve seen on it — would be a headline-of-the-year contender: “Drug-Dealing White Supremacist Stripper Sentenced for Obstruction of Justice.”

Used last week by outlets such as CBS 11, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and other news outlets across Texas, the story behind that trigger word-filled header stems from a Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas press release from Thursday, August 13. That statement announced the sentencing of a 28-year-old Dallas man named Collin Garrett Hayden to 200 months (just more than 16 years) in federal prison on separate charges of possessing a weapon in jail and obstruction of justice.

What’s crazy is that the headline only catches some of this story’s juicy-as-hell details. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Hayden first popped up on law enforcement’s radar when it began investigating the trafficking of methamphetamine Dallas into East Texas, at which point they allegedly discovered Hayden selling drugs with his roommate, selling cocaine in Dallas strip clubs in which he works and selling meth to a buyer in Shreveport.
  • Upon learning of drug trafficking charges against him, Hayden allegedly threatened to have his roommate killed by a white supremacist prison gang of which he was a member.
  • While in jail, Hayden then attempted to illegally obtain a cell phone through a bribe — and, after being caught, he “obtained a shank-type weapon and threatened to kill any guards who entered his cell.”

For most news consumers, details like those tend to bring to life this amazing popcorn-eating gif:

But, in the 2020 headline-of-the-year debate, even this story pales in comparison to ones relating to the major issues of our times.

Shout out to the ongoing pandemic, the ongoing protests and the ever-ongoing presidential campaign — just to name a few obvious, top-level, clubhouse-leading contenders — for overshadowing Hayden’s (literal) trials and tribulations at the moment, we guess?

Here’s looking to the inevitable true crime content this story spurs in a few years, though.

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