ELLSWORTH – A Bucksport police officer who chased a speeding pickup truck filled with young people described Tuesday how he knew the Verona Island crash that killed a Prospect teenager was inevitable.

Patrolman Brian Knight of Bucksport had begun pursuing the speeding truck with its five occupants moments before it crashed on June 19, 2001.

On the witness stand, he recalled how he closed his eyes seconds before the truck crashed into a telephone pole.

“I didn’t want to see it,” said Knight, who was the first person to arrive at the accident scene.

Hope Porter, 14, of Prospect died in the accident.

Knight said he found one of the passengers walking away from the damaged truck. The driver reportedly was jammed underneath the dashboard and extricated himself from the wreck.

“It appeared to me he was trying to get away from the scene,” Knight testified about defendant Paul Mason, 29, of Frankfort, on trial for manslaughter. “I told him to stop.”

Knight said he could detect alcohol on Mason.

Mason faces five charges in connection with the June 19, 2001, crash. In addition to manslaughter, he is charged with one count of aggravated assault with a dangerous weapon, one count of reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon, one count of eluding a police officer, and one count of operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicants.

He remains free on a $5,000 bond.

If convicted, he faces a possible sentence of 40 years in prison for manslaughter. The other crimes, all felonies, most likely would draw concurrent sentences upon conviction.

During his testimony, Knight said he first noticed the pickup, tires squealing, after it turned onto Main Street in Bucksport. The police officer said he activated his blue lights and followed the vehicle.

The truck sped up, crossing the Bucksport-Verona bridge and approaching the Waldo-Hancock Bridge at a speed too fast for road conditions, he said.

Knight said he “knew that piece of road, and I knew there was a corner, so I slowed down” to 25 mph or 30 mph.

The next time he saw the truck, “it was six or seven car lengths away, moving at a rapid rate of speed. The driver apparently lost control and it headed straight for the telephone pole,” Knight said.

Through his attorney, Joe Baiungo of Belfast, Mason maintains he wasn’t driving the green Ford pickup that sped away from a party in a Bucksport trailer park shortly before the crash.

Patrick Larson, a Hancock County assistant district attorney, told jurors Mason’s DNA has been recovered from the headrest and other areas of the driver’s seat.

A Maine State Police trooper testified that Mason’s blood alcohol level two hours after the accident was 0.16, twice the state’s legal limit of 0.08.

In his opening remarks, Baiungo discredited the passengers in the truck, who are expected to be prosecution witnesses.

“If you’re drunk and stoned, you’re not a reliable witness,” Baiungo told the jury.

“If anybody could bring Hope Porter back, we would,” the defense attorney said.

About 15 prosecution witnesses are expected to testify, including medical experts, a forensic chemist and a DNA expert.

In his opening remarks, Larson described a spur-of-the-moment ride that quickly turned fatal. When they left the trailer party on Hink Street, the girls reportedly sat on the laps of two male passengers, he told the jury.

The truck snapped off a utility pole, crashed through a guardrail and rolled down an embankment just before the Waldo-Hancock Bridge on Route 1. Everyone but the defendant was ejected from the vehicle.

Amid the confusion at the accident scene, the truck’s engine caught fire but was quickly extinguished.

Michael Denning, Bucksport assistant fire chief and EMT, said he found Porter under a broken fence “unconscious and unresponsive.” Kane, dazed and screaming for help, was sitting on top of Porter.

“She was having trouble breathing,” Denning said of Porter.

Porter was taken by LifeFlight helicopter to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, but she died of “blunt force trauma before she was treated,” Denning said.

Mason’s brother Adam Mason, now 24, was seriously injured in the single-vehicle crash. Two other teens, Nicholas Leach, then 19, of Bucksport and April Kane, then 16, of Orland, received minor injuries.

Porter’s relatives reacted to descriptions of her last moments by wiping their eyes and turning away.

When Knight identified a picture of the upended truck, Porter’s relatives made audible sighs.

One eyewitness, two police officers and four emergency medical technicians testified Tuesday at the criminal jury trial, which is expected to last all week in Hancock County Superior Court.

The case is being heard by a jury of nine women and five men, including two alternates. Justice Jeffrey Hjelm is presiding.

Attending Tuesday’s opening session were relatives of both the defendant and the victim. They declined to be interviewed.