Brewer man pleads guilty to, regrets racial threat

AUGUSTA – A 75-year-old Brewer man whose threats of violence prompted the Bangor chapter of the NAACP to cancel last winter’s Kwanzaa celebration has pleaded guilty to terrorizing and offered an apology.

“I’m deeply sorry for the incident and I’m regretting it every day,” Kendrick Sawyer Jr. said Tuesday after he pleaded guilty in Augusta District Court to terrorizing.

Sawyer’s lawyer, Richard Hall, said his client was raised by an openly racist father and grandfather and made the threats when he was despondent and distraught.

Defense and prosecution lawyers, along with leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recommended a sentence that calls for Sawyer to be placed on administrative release – a form of nonreporting probation – for a year, with special conditions that include counseling.

NAACP attorney Diane Khiel and chapter president Joe Perry will be allowed to view Sawyer’s mental health records. Sawyer is banned from contact with NAACP members except when he is invited to meet them to hear how his actions affected them.

“This was quite a traumatic event and one we hope no other organization has to endure,” Perry told Judge Richard Mulhern.

If Sawyer complies with the special conditions, he will be allowed to withdraw the guilty plea. Otherwise, the conviction will stand and he will spend a second year on administrative release.

The complaint said Sawyer made his threat to murder NAACP members while he was meeting with medical professionals last October at the veterans medical center at Togus.