AUGUSTA – A 54-year-old convicted child sex offender who fled from Maine while on probation is going back to prison for 15 years.

Kennebec County Superior Court Justice Nancy Mills sentenced Eugene Trundy on Friday to 15 years in prison followed by 14 years of probation.

Trundy admitted to violating probation by leaving the state and failing to complete sex offender counseling.

Trundy, who used to live in Bangor, was convicted in 1989 for a series of assaults against children in Kennebec County and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

He was released in 2002 and disappeared from his Bangor home in 2003. He was on Maine’s most-wanted list for two years before being located last fall in Arizona.

Winthrop police Chief Joseph Young said he would have liked to see Trundy spend the rest of his life in prison, “not to punish him, but to protect the rest of society from him, because he’s never going to change, as is evident in this most recent case.”

“When he was arrested in Arizona, he was found with some explicit material, and there’s a good possibility that during the period he was there he re-offended,” Young said.

This wasn’t the first time Trundy had fled the court system.

In 1982, he was indicted on charges of sexually abusing three children in three separate incidents in Winthrop. He disappeared before his trial and was found six years later in California.