LINCOLN, Maine — Police charged a Westfield man Thursday with leading officers on a 17½-hour car and foot chase that started on West Broadway, peaked at 100 mph and ended in woods in Greenbush.
Don Hanson, 33, of Westfield, was charged Thursday with eluding an officer, failure to stop when signaled by police officer, exceeding the posted speed limit by 30 mph or more and driving to endanger, all misdemeanors, police said. He was also charged with multiple other driving infractions.
The hazard posed by Hanson’s speeding and the pursuit along West Broadway near Mattanawcook Lake nearly forced Officer John Walsh to call it off shortly after he saw the vehicle on West Broadway at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Walsh said.
“He stayed in the lane pretty well, actually. A couple of times he came out of it,” Walsh said Thursday. “Initially on West Broadway I thought about breaking it off. If he turned left [onto Main Street], I would have broken it off, but he turned right onto Enfield Road.”
“The conditions were not bad enough to warrant breaking off the pursuit,” Lincoln Public Safety Director Dan Summers said. “As it went along [into Greenbush], the speeds actually lowered because it was obvious that the individual driving was not very knowledgeable of the roads out there.”
The incident began when a motorist traveling into Lincoln along West Broadway from Enfield called 911 and reported a Ford Mustang GT moving erratically. Penobscot Regional Communication Center dispatchers relayed the message to Walsh, who stopped the Mustang on West Broadway near the Lincoln News office before it took off again, Summers said.
With Walsh regularly radioing speed and condition reports to other responding officers and his supervisors, the pursuit probably had an average speed of 60 mph through Lincoln and slowed to 40 mph as it continued onto several side streets in Enfield and Greenbush, Summers said.
State police blew out the tires on the Mustang with a spike strip on Greenfield Road near Spring Bridge Road in Greenbush and ended the vehicular portion of the pursuit when one trooper used his police cruiser to bump the Ford into a ditch, Summers said.
The suspect, later identified as Hanson, ran into the woods, but police took two women who were in the Mustang with him into custody for questioning. Several state police officers and Penobscot County Sheriff’s Deputy Ryan Allen and his tracking dog, Dozer, searched for Hanson before he was found at about 10 a.m. on Thursday, Summers said.
“He had been out there all night,” Summers said.
The vehicle pursuit went slightly more than 28 miles, Summers said.
Summers declined to identify the women, whom he said police were treating as victims. The police investigation, however, is continuing. State police have identified Hanson as a suspect in a burglary of a garage in Greenbush and the women have extensive, though minor, criminal records, Summers and Walsh said.
Hanson was also a suspect in a brief state police pursuit in Auburn along Route 122 on Oct. 6 and is on probation for an unknown charge, Summers said. No bail has yet been set on Hanson, who was being held at the Lincoln police station and is due in Penobscot Judicial Center in Bangor on Jan. 15, Summers said.