BELFAST, Maine — During the last 30 years, Waldo County’s new sheriff was involved in busting one of Maine’s biggest cocaine rings, searched for an armed maniac who abducted a Swiss exchange student outside the Litchfield fairgrounds and worked to fight domestic violence.
Now, Sheriff Jeffrey Trafton will be the head of an agency that has 38 employees, contains the Maine Coast Regional Reentry Center and has a total budget of about $4 million. He took the reins earlier this month from Sheriff Scott Story, who served in the position for 15 years.
“This is a very good agency,” Trafton, 52, who lives in Thorndike, said this week. “This agency is a well-oiled machine.”
He brings to the job years of experience, beginning with a four-year stint in the U.S. Marines after he graduated from high school in Piscataquis County. Trafton said he was a “peacetime Marine,” teaching recruits to drive military vehicles at the military equivalent of the Department of Motor Vehicles in Virginia. But he always wanted to go into police work, and at the end of his four years he came home and joined the Maine State Police.
Trafton graduated from the police academy in 1984 and was assigned to the Thomaston barracks — just in time to be part of a January 1985 drug surveillance operation in Belfast that resulted in the arrest of 20 cocaine traffickers. He also arrested one of Waldo County’s most notorious criminals — without meaning to — one night during the summer of 1985 while doing OUI enforcement at the 10-4 Store in Liberty.
A blue Dodge Dart squealed in circles right in front of Trafton, and the trooper put on his blue lights and chased the other driver up and down Liberty village. At one point, the driver stopped, got out and took off on foot, with Trafton close behind.
“I tackled him in the swamp,” he remembered.
The man was Joel Fuller, out on bail for the December 1984 murder of drug dealer Norman Grenier. When Fuller was being escorted back to the Waldo County Jail after the chase, he asked Trafton if he enjoyed that “as much as I did.”
“I thought, ‘Yeah, I kind of did,’” Trafton recalled.
Another dramatic case happened in 1994, when Trafton was working a detail outside a Christian revival at the Litchfield fairgrounds. A teenage boy from Pittston and teenage girl from Switzerland were kidnapped at gunpoint outside the fairgrounds by Paul Bonin, an 18-year-old who lived in the area, Trafton said. Bonin shot the boy three times and left him to die, taking the girl with him into the woods, where he sexually assaulted her.
But the boy didn’t die. He crawled back up through the field to the fair gate, where he told a deputy what happened.
“We mobilized quite a large force,” Trafton recalled.
Police cordoned off the area and did an intensive search. They weren’t sure what they would find. But at 4 a.m., when Trafton was sweeping the woods with his flashlight, he found Bonin, who still had the girl. His gun was tucked into his belt, Trafton said.
“I remember telling him, ‘If you move, I will shoot you.’ He did not move a muscle,” Trafton said. As soon as she was free, the girl ran to bear-hug one of the police sergeants who was there, he recalled. “That was a very exciting night.”
After spending 22 years with the Maine State Police, Trafton became chief of the Belfast Police Department.
“It was a great job. I really enjoyed the people I worked with,” he said. “With state government, there was such a giant bureaucracy. It was such a breath of fresh air to come to Belfast. If I needed something, I just walked across the street to talk to the city manager about it.”
Major cases in Belfast included the 2008 homicide of James Cummings, who was building a “dirty bomb” in his kitchen, allegedly to use at President Barack Obama’s inauguration, when he was shot to death by his wife, Amber.
Trafton has been the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy since 2011 and ran unopposed for sheriff last fall, after Story decided to retire. One of his priorities as sheriff will be to continue fighting against domestic violence.
“It has to be. It’s just unacceptable,” he said. “Too many victims are affected — too many children. We’re going to fight this fight, no matter how long it takes.”
Trafton said he plans to attend all select board and council meetings in the county in the near future, so he can introduce himself as the sheriff.
“We do cost the taxpayers a fair amount of money. I want them to know we’re working hard for them,” he said.
His first stops will be in Unity at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 20; in Stockton Springs at 9 a.m. Thursday, Jan. 22; and in Winterport at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 3.