Two men share Deputy of the Year honors

MACHIAS – Two Washington County sheriff’s deputies credited with saving a distraught man’s life last fall have been chosen by their peers to share Deputy of the Year honors.

Sgt. Donald Smith and Cpl. Jack Fuller were presented with the awards during the Maine Sheriffs’ Association annual meeting last week at the Samoset Resort in Rockport.

“We’re very proud of them.” Sheriff Joseph Tibbetts said Thursday. “This county is lucky to have Jack and Donnie.”

Chief Deputy Sidney Hughes said he immediately thought of Fuller and Smith when he saw the nomination form from the association.

The two responded to a report early on Nov. 18 of a man with a gun who had taken refuge in a state Department of Transportation garage in Wesley. The man said he was going to shoot himself.

A Gulf War veteran who had a friend die in his arms, the man said he was having flashbacks and just couldn’t take it anymore, Hughes said. He told the officers he had lost his job and had to be out of his home that day because a bank had foreclosed.

Fuller, 56, said he and Maine State Police Trooper Chuck Matthews arrived first and found a man sitting in the corner of an office with a desk on one side of him and a file cabinet on the other. He had a .30-30 rifle tucked under his chin, and the hammer was cocked. A can of gasoline was sitting by his side.

Fuller said the man told him his first plan had been to set himself on fire, but that he was concerned about the building and costing taxpayers money.

Fuller said there was no doubt in his mind that the man wanted to kill himself.

“This wasn’t just a cry for help,” he said “Every once in a while he’d lean back in his chair and his eyes would glaze over and he’d say it was time.”

Fuller said he and the trooper talked with the man for more than an hour and, at one point, arranged for him to talk by phone with a psychiatrist who recently had seen him at a hospital in Fort Kent.

Smith, 49, had known the man since high school and arrived just after Fuller and Matthews offered to pray with the man.

Smith had convinced the man to go to the hospital after an earlier incident and the man told the officers he’d received help there, Hughes said.

“We prayed for a miracle and look at what God sent us,” Fuller remembers remarking as Smith came toward the building that Nov. 18. “He looked out the window and it was the only time I saw his expression change.”

When Smith entered the building, the man said if he didn’t kill himself it would be because of Smith and that he’d give his gun to Smith.

It was another hour and a half before the man agreed to go to a hospital if Smith took him to Fort Kent, stopping on the way for a hamburger and a carton of cigarettes.

“He took a deep breath and handed over the rifle,” Hughes said on the nomination form.

Hughes said he later learned that Smith stopped on the way to the hospital and bought the hamburger and cigarettes – paying for them from his own pocket.