PRESQUE ISLE – The suspect in the beating death of a Canadian tourist in Old Orchard Beach was described by friends and associates in the city where he was raised as having a dark side when drinking.

Benjamin Humphrey, 29, has been sent to jail 16 times since 1991 for charges including assault, forgery, criminal mischief and drunken driving.

He is back in jail in South Dakota, where he and his girlfriend, Aimee Pelletier, are awaiting their return to face charges in the slaying of a Canadian military musician last month in Old Orchard Beach.

Humphrey is charged with beating Derek Rogers to death, and Pelletier faces a charge of hindering apprehension.

Donna Humphrey, the adoptive mother of Humphrey and his sister in Mapleton, six miles from Presque Isle, can only guess what happened early July 31 when Rogers died, but she suspects alcohol was a factor.

“Alcohol is the culprit here,” Donna Humphrey said of her son. “When he started on that, he had trouble.”

In a small city like Presque Isle, Benjamin Humphrey was big, at 6 feet 4 inches tall and close to 300 pounds.

To some, he was a wannabe gang leader and bully in his neighborhood. To others he was a good kid who let a drinking problem lead him deeper into trouble. To police, he’s a murder suspect who fled the state before getting arrested at a shopping mall in South Dakota.

Humphrey and his sister are Sioux Indians from South Dakota. They were adopted as toddlers and brought to northern Maine to live with Donna and Earl Humphrey in a white-frame house in Mapleton.

Ben became a star left-handed pitcher in Little League, and every September he joined the other children in the fields when school shut down for the three-week potato harvest. As he grew older, word of his athletic talent, especially in basketball, spread around the area.

In his junior year at Presque Isle High School he was a starting forward on a team that came within five minutes of playing for the state championship.

The next year, there was an incident that Donna Humphrey sees as the start of Ben’s troubles. The team went across the border into Canada, where the drinking age was 18 instead of 21. The members of the team who were 18 or older went to a bar. “They brought him home drunk,” Donna Humphrey said.

Later in that same season, Ben walked out of basketball practice when his coach refused to let him get a drink of water. Humphrey never came back, and was cut from the team.

Donna Humphrey believes both her adopted children were susceptible to alcoholism because they are American Indians. Though that is decried by some as the “firewater myth” used to justify prejudice against Indians, researchers have found that many Indians may indeed have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, with some evidence that many lack an enzyme in their livers needed to metabolize alcohol.

Whether it was genetic or cultural or just by choice, Donna Humphrey said, alcohol and trouble became the focus of her adopted children’s lives.

Ben Humphrey became a regular at a Main Street pool hall called Wizard’s, where he showed an edge to his personality that made people cautious.

“Drinking changes everyone, some for the better, some for the worse,” said Chris Perry, a bartender at Wizard’s. “Ben was probably part of the second group.”

Assistant District Attorney Carrie Linthicum, who has prosecuted Humphrey on various charges over the last seven years, said she can easily reconcile the two sides of his personality.

“I would say he had a bad alcohol problem and [as a result] has been constantly in court,” she said “My contact with him has all been alcohol-related.”