March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

New Jersey man, sons safe after cold night in woods

BOWERBANK — A New Jersey man and his two sons spent a cold, wet night in a swamp after they became lost Monday while hiking to a small pond in Bowerbank.

Sgt. Warden Dan Tourtelotte of the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife said that James McKnight, 37, and his two sons, Ian, 11, and Sean, 8, of Washington, N.J., left Packard’s Camps on Sebec Lake at about 10:30 a.m. Monday to go fishing at Buttermilk Pond.

Tourtelotte said the trio crossed Sebec Lake by boat to what they thought was a path that led to First Buttermilk Pond. Instead, McKnight followed the town line between Bowerbank and Williamsburg into an “awful thick, swampy place on top of Buttermilk Ridge.”

“He basically went across the town line until he hit the outlet of First Buttermilk and then he went down the stream, the Ship Pond Stream. Then he got confused there and decided he should go back up,” Tourtelotte said. By that time, it was nightfall.

When McKnight and his sons failed to return to camp at about 9 p.m., Jerry Packard alerted game wardens. Tourtelotte, Jerry Packard, Rick Packard and Warden Don Annis searched the area Monday evening.

On Tuesday, Packard, piloting his own airplane, spotted the trio at about 5 a.m. McKnight waved an umbrella that he had carried on the trip. “It’s the only lost person I’ve seen who had an umbrella,” Tourtelotte said.

The McKnight boys suffered some hypothermia. Their father told Tourtelotte that he took turns curling up beside each son in an attempt to keep them warm throughout the night.

In an unrelated incident, game wardens were called on Sunday to locate a fisherman who had failed to meet a friend two days earlier as arranged at First Roach Pond in Frenchtown Township.

The concerned friend told wardens that the man failed to show up for the fishing trip Friday, and had not been seen or heard from since. He thought perhaps his friend was lost in the area.

Wardens made some telephone calls and discovered that the man was in jail.

Tourtelotte said the man had visited a Greenville bar where he had had too many drinks. After he left the bar, he decided to return to his home to get a tackle box, but never made it.

He was stopped and arrested by an officer from the Skowhegan Police Department for operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicating liquor.


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