BANGOR – The Rev. Richard Forcier was a full-time student at Bangor Theological Seminary and pastor of the former Unitarian Church in the summer of 1984 when three teenagers attacked an openly gay man on a downtown street.

A husband and the father of two young children, Forcier was on vacation visiting family in Rhode Island the week of July Fourth when he received a phone call he has never forgotten.

“Rich, something terrible has happened. Can you come home?” Lois Reed, then president of the church board, asked the minister.

That terrible something, Forcier, 54, of Barre, Vt., recalled Sunday in a sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Bangor, was the death of Charlie Howard, a member of his flock.

Howard died July 7, 1984, at age 23 when he was attacked and thrown from the State Street bridge into Kenduskeag Stream. He suffered a severe asthma attack and drowned because he did not know how to swim.

Forcier returned to Bangor this year for the annual memorial service for Howard. In his sermon, he reflected on how Howard’s death and its aftermath have shaped his ministry.

“I returned to Bangor the next day,” Forcier recalled. “The phone calls were nonstop from the national and local news outlets, from parishioners, from strangers wanting information. Amidst all of it, there was deep grief and heartsickness at what had happened in our town.

“The night of the memorial service,” he continued, “hundreds of people streamed in. When I went to close the doors [to mark the beginning of the service], I thought, ‘I’m not up to this. I’m not worthy. I can’t do this.’ I’d never done a memorial service before, let alone one like this.”

He turned out to be up to it, but when he graduated from the seminary the next year and was ordained at the same church, Forcier was exhausted physically and emotionally. He spent three years working in industry before taking his current job in 1988 as pastor at the First Universalist Church in Barre, Vt.

After the service in Bangor on Sunday, worshippers walked from the church as they did 24 years ago to the site where Howard was killed. Reed, now 74, of Carmel tossed a white rose into Kenduskeag Stream, and about 20 other church members and visitors dropped colored chrysanthemums into the water.

“That experience as a student minister profoundly shaped my religious convictions,” Forcier said during an interview after the service with reporters. “They were a little on the shaky side before that.”

The minister said that those convictions included “keeping in mind the larger vision that God is calling us to be greater than we are. I didn’t know that back then.”

Church and community members are planning a series of events next summer for the 25th anniversary of Howard’s death.

Forcier has said he would attend.

jharrison@bangordailynews.net

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