March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Woman reports abduction try > Old Town police saw suspicious truck

OLD TOWN — A woman in her 40s walking home early Sunday morning was stopped by a man driving a flatbed truck who demanded she enter the vehicle at gunpoint, police officials said Monday.

The appearance of another vehicle apparently scared the man away, but the incident alarmed several officers, unused to such brazen activity on Old Town’s quiet streets.

“We just don’t want to see this happen again,” said Officer Debbie Holmes, who took the call from the terrified woman shortly after 1:30 a.m. “God only knows what would have happened if that car hadn’t come.”

In addition to her obviously distraught demeanor, the woman described a peculiar detail of the man’s truck — one that was spotted by four different patrol units that night.

The woman noticed “something strange” about the truck’s taillights. As it turns out, several officers had spotted a flatbed truck with one red and one orange taillight — the kind of detail that seems tantalizing only in hindsight.

“We all saw the vehicle at various times during the night,” Holmes said. “When we found out about the incident, it was just like `shoot.’ But we don’t run every plate.”

The woman described a small flatbed truck, possibly a Nissan or a Toyota, and a thin, scruffy-looking man in his 50s or 60s. She told police that she recognized neither his face nor his voice.

The man passed the woman on the road four or five times before following her down Veazie Street, according to police reports. That’s when he lowered his window, pulled out a gun and said, “Get in the car or I’m going to shoot you.”

The man fled when another vehicle turned onto the street. The woman frantically banged on several doors before someone let her in and she was able to contact police.

“She was absolutely hysterical,” Holmes said. “She said `I thought I was going to be dead.”‘

The officer could not remember a similar incident in the Old Town area, but did mention a pair of suscipicious road-related attacks in the Waterville area on Oct. 9. In one of those incidents, a sympathetic woman drove a man who complained of brake problems to Clinton, where he raped her in a cemetery.

The description of the man in the Old Town case does not match the Waterville suspect, described as a dark-haired white man in his 20s.

A statewide teletype distributed by Old Town police turned up no leads.

“It’s like he disappeared into thin air,” said Holmes. “We looked for hours.”

Holmes advised that a person in the woman’s situation should do anything to avoid getting into the vehicle. “Kick. Scream. Slam the door,” the officer said. “But if you get in the car, you’re probably going to wind up dead.”

Anyone with information relevant to Sunday’s incident should call the Old Town Police Department at 827-6358.


Have feedback? Want to know more? Send us ideas for follow-up stories.

comments for this post are closed

You may also like