MACHIAS – A Machias woman now in the Washington County Adult Drug Treatment Court and a Milbridge woman who graduated last year from the same program were arrested Friday afternoon for violations of their probation contracts.

Holly Lee, 38, of Machias and Sarah Snider, 21, of Milbridge were being held Friday evening without bail at Washington County Jail.

The two were arrested after an off-duty deputy with the Washington County Sheriff’s Department allegedly spotted Lee purchasing beer in a local store.

When Lee realized she had been seen, she left the beer that she had paid for on the counter and returned to her car. Snider was with her.

The deputy phoned Deputy Travis Willey and alerted him that the women were together. Neither woman is allowed to have contact with the other, one of the terms of their individual probation contracts.

The off-duty deputy followed Lee’s car along U.S. Route 1 as far as Columbia. Willey waited on Route 1 outside of Milbridge and pulled over the car when it approached.

A male, whose name was not released, was present in the car, but he was not arrested.

Lee is a former physical education teacher at Machias Memorial High School. She had been indicted in February 2004 for trafficking in scheduled drugs, and pleaded guilty in November to two lesser drug charges, one Class C and one Class D.

She served 90 days at the county jail, part of her underlying two-year sentence with the Department of Corrections. A handful of probation violations through the spring resulted in her admittance to the drug court last month.

Snider was a basketball star at Narraguagus High School, where she would have been the Class of 2002’s valedictorian before she was derailed by drug use that spring.

Snider completed the drug court program a year ago June, but was back in Washington County Superior Court this spring for another probation violation.

The state had sought revocation of her probation after she admitted to slipping in her drug abstinence efforts in January. She reported her violation herself.

Justice E. Allen Hunter called Snider “a poster child for parental heartbreak” during the hearing. He acknowledged he was willing to take a gamble on her and turned back the state’s request to revoke her probation, which runs three years.

Snider’s case drew publicity in 2002 when she and another Washington County basketball star, Morgan Drew of Calais, were convicted of burglary of a household in Princeton.