Collin Charles Maher
2006-2026
Our son. The founder of the Cocoa Classic.
How it started
Collin was a sophomore at The Mount Vernon School in Sandy Springs when he noticed children at a local food bank wearing worn-out shoes. He decided to do something about it.
What started as an Eagle Scout project became the Cocoa Classic — a 5K that has put brand-new shoes on the feet of more than 1,600 children in the Sandy Springs community, and that got written up everywhere from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Runner's World.
Who he was
On his first day as a freshman at WashU, Collin noticed a girl sitting alone on a bench, looking sad. He didn't know her. He sat down anyway, and by the time he got up she was laughing about how much she missed home.
We didn't hear that story until months later, from her. She wanted us to know what it had meant — that a stranger had seen her in a vulnerable moment and made her feel like someone. They were friends from that day on.
That was Collin. He noticed people, and he did something about it.
At WashU his standing invitation to everyone was talk to me. His balcony on the top floor of Dauten Hall was the place people ended up — conversation, laughing, country music out of an orange-and-white speaker at all hours. One friend said the thing his closest friendships had in common was that Collin had made them. He was the glue in his fraternity pledge class. He was the one who volunteered for the dunk tank in cold water when nobody else would.
He loved late-night Waffle House runs. He loved Chris Cornell. He did impressions that weren't always as good as he thought they were. He took a friend jetskiing on the promise that they wouldn't end up in the water, then immediately attempted a 360 off a wave and launched them both twenty feet — and they laughed the whole time they were swimming back to it. When he and his roommate dropped a suitemate's ID onto the balcony below, he didn't knock on the door. He built a retrieval device out of tape, traffic sticks, and a lamp.
One of his friends said afterward that he knows what Collin would tell him to do: if you see someone sitting alone, go talk to them.
What happened
Collin died by suicide on May 15, 2026, at the age of nineteen, weeks after finishing his freshman year at Washington University in St. Louis.
He was diagnosed with ADHD in first grade, later with anxiety, and had twelve years of steady, attentive care. Four days before he died his spring grades came in. They were terrific, and he had an internship starting that he was excited about.
Mental health struggles are real, and they can be invisible even in the people who seem happiest and most full of life. Our family has experienced that truth firsthand.
What continues
The Cocoa Classic continues in his name, with a mission shaped by what we learned too late: that emotional regulation can be measured, that it responds to treatment, and that almost nobody is looking for it.
AJC — Mount Vernon School sophomore organizes Cocoa Classic 5K to buy shoes for kids