Woman has charge reduced

A woman accused of shooting at her husband in the Hermon High School parking lot will be prosecuted on a lesser charge than she initially faced.

Police had charged Theresa Stokes with attempted murder, but on Monday the Penobscot County grand jury indicted her for alleged reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon.

“The evidence indicated that her conduct was more reckless than deliberate,” Deputy District Attorney Michael P. Roberts explained after the indictment was returned.

Stokes, 34, of Bangor was arrested Nov. 27 after Bangor police surrounded a car at the entrance to the Maine Air National Guard base. They had received a tip that the suspects were at the base.

Two days earlier, Hermon High School driver education students had reported that a car had pulled into the parking lot and that the woman inside had fired shots at her male companion — later identified as her 33-year-old husband, David Stokes — and that a young child also was inside the car.

The shot missed the man but hit the driver’s side window. The man reportedly wrested the gun from her grip and they drove off.

Police at first feared that Theresa Stokes had been held against her will. After the couple was stopped and questioned, that theory was discounted.

Questioning also led them to the couple’s Fern Street apartment, where they found a .357-caliber Magnum revolver believed used in the shooting. Also at the home, hidden beneath a plastic tarp, was the car the students had seen. The Stokeses were in a different vehicle when the police stopped them.

The Stokeses had arrived in Maine from Arkansas about three weeks before the incident, the first of three reported shootings within hours of each other in Hermon that day.

A woman reported that her car windshield had been shattered, apparently by gunshot, as she drove on Billings Road.

“We believe now that that was some other freak accident,” Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Glenn Ross said Monday. “(It) probably was coincidental.”

At about the same time as that report, two cows were found shot between the eyes and left to die in a pasture. Two men have been charged in connection with that, but were not among those indicted Monday. Roberts said the case was still under investigation.