MONSON, Maine — A 56-year-old man shot by a Piscataquis County deputy last week had sent a rambling, threatening text message to a neighbor, according to a court document.
Quinton King of Monson appeared to be experiencing mental health problems, a couple from Lubec who had given him a ride three days before the shooting told the Bangor Daily News.
King was shot March 12 at his Nana’s Lane home after he allegedly pointed a rifle at Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Office deputies Kyle Wilson and David Wilson. The two lawmen, who are not related, were at King’s house to serve him a protection from harassment order and a trespassing warning to stay away from the Monson municipal building. People at the municipal building had called the sheriff’s office earlier in the day saying that King had left a threatening voicemail at the town office, according to Chief Deputy Robert Young.
A threatening text message that police said King sent to his neighbor the night before the shooting is contained in an affidavit filed in Piscataquis County Superior Court in Dover-Foxcroft.
“Don’t bother to come over here because I have loaded gun just waiting for you you could be the first bloodshed in my war,” a portion of King’s text states.
When Lt. James Kane, the lead investigator on the King case, asked the neighbor what he thought the text meant, “he said he didn’t know but it made him very uncomfortable,” according to the court document.
Deputy Kyle Wilson fired a single shot that passed through King’s rib cage and hit him in the arm, according to Sheriff John Goggin. Wilson, who was hired in August 2013, is on administrative leave, which is protocol, pending a use of force investigation by the Maine attorney general’s office, Young said.
King, who was taken to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor and later released into police custody, remained Wednesday at Piscataquis County Jail in Dover-Foxcroft.
At his first court appearance on charges of criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon and reckless conduct with a firearm on Monday, King’s bail was set at $75,000 surety or $10,000 cash, according to R. Christopher Almy, Piscataquis County district attorney. His next court date is in April, and it’s expected that King, who has no criminal history in Maine, will be indicted by the Piscataquis County grand jury. Almy said Wednesday that he did not know if King has a diagnosed mental illness.
Three days before King was shot, he and his dog had hitched a ride a few miles from his home with two people from Lubec.
After talking with their passenger for a few minutes as they drove, Charles Kniffen and his wife, Rhonda Welcome, believed that King was dealing with a mental health issue.
“In just a few moments of conversation, it became apparent that Mr. King was undergoing some sort of manic episode and that any disagreement or doubtful questioning of his plan would not be appreciated,” said Kniffen, a former social worker, who said he previously worked at a community mental health center in Norwich, New Hampshire.
Welcome, who previously worked at the Abbot House, an assisted living facility in Abbot, and now runs Turtle Dance Totems in Lubec with her husband, said the couple “didn’t feel threatened at all” by King during their ride.
“When he got into the car, he acted like a person trying to get our vote,” she said. “All the things he was trying to do, they weren’t bad things. If you pick someone up hitchhiking, you’re always going to get a story.
“We both said a little prayer when he got out of the car … for him and his little dog,” Welcome said.
After learning that King had been shot by law enforcement personnel, Welcome and Kniffen felt compelled to contact the Bangor Daily News and share their view that the incident needs to serve as a catalyst for changing the way society deals with the mentally ill.
Affidavit details shooting
Wilson knocked on King’s door at about 10 a.m. with the protection order papers in his hand, according to an affidavit filed by Deputy David Wilson. King allegedly opened the door, but slammed it quickly. As Kyle Wilson retreated to a safer location, King opened his door again and appeared with a rifle in his left hand and an ammunition clip in his right, according to the affidavit.
Both deputies drew their weapons and attempted to take cover, yelling at King to drop the gun, but he took no notice, according to the affidavit.
“Mr. King was looking at us as he continued to load the clip into the rifle and ignoring the commands for him to put down the weapon. Mr. King was yelling incoherently as he did this,” David Wilson wrote.
When Kane spoke to King on Sunday at the Piscataquis County Jail, King told him he closed the door because he didn’t want to talk to the officers, according to the affidavit.
“He said he figured the officers had seen the gun inside his house, so he decided to go talk to them,” Kane wrote, explaining why King returned to his door. “He said he wanted to show the officers that the gun was not loaded so he opened the door and stepped out with the rifle.
“I asked if the officers were telling him anything or if he was saying anything to them, and he said they were yelling for him to put the gun down, but that he couldn’t put the gun down unless you know it isn’t loaded or else it could go off,” Kane wrote. “He said the officers yelled at him to put the gun down three times, and then they shot him.”
A second rifle was allegedly found leaning near the door after King was taken away in the ambulance.
King also told Kane he thought the deputies were at his house about a Jeep “he had borrowed” the night before. When the deputies arrived, the Jeep was running, and the back gate was open, the affidavit states. It had been reported stolen the night before.
According to the affidavit, King told Kane that he left the message on the town’s voicemail because he was upset with the fire department’s response to a previous 911 call that he made.
“He said he gave them an ultimatum because he didn’t want to continue paying his taxes for a service that wasn’t being provided,” Kane said.
Piscataquis County deputies had dealt with King on three different occasions in the days before the March 12 shooting, Young said Monday.
On March 2, King reported his truck was stolen, which police investigators deemed unfounded; on March 11, the neighbor called police concerned about King who had been sending “rambling text messages,” but police were unable to locate King; and at 1:30 a.m. March 12, he left the threatening message at the municipal building, Young said.
“The threats were not criminal. They were threats to sue them,” the deputy chief said of the messages left at the town office and fire department. “They were rambling, nonsensible rants, especially against the fire department. ‘Don’t come on my property or I’m going to sue you. I won’t sue you, if you don’t charge me another tax bill.’”
Town Manager Lucas Butler also gave responding deputies several harassing-threatening letters to the town sent by King, the affidavit states.
When the two deputies arrived at King’s house, “they knew that he had been acting kind of unusual,” Young said.
Both deputies have received Crisis Intervention Training, designed to improve the abilities of officers to neutralize hostile situations, according to Young.
Goggin said last week that before recent events, law enforcement only had one previous run-in with King about five years ago that Goggin described as “insignificant.”
‘He needed some type of help’
The state attorney general’s office, which investigates all use of deadly force cases, has investigated 69 police-involved shootings in Maine between 2003 and August of 2014 and found them all justified. It is working on four so far in 2015 — a Jan. 12 shooting of an unruly patient at the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, a Feb. 8 standoff in Bangor that ended peacefully after a brief exchange of gunfire, a fatal armed confrontation in Smyrna on Feb. 10 and the Monson incident involving King.
A 2012 Portland Press Herald article stated that 42 percent of police shootings in Maine between 2000 and 2012 involved people with mental illness.
Young declined to answer questions about King’s medical history for privacy reasons.
Almy said those in public safety “need more options.”
“Mental illness is an issue, and the options we have are scarce,” Almy said Tuesday. “You can get people blue papered if there is sufficient evidence.”
Anyone, including health care providers and law enforcement officers, can file to have someone involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, or blue papered, but it requires that the person being admitted has mental illness and that they pose “a likelihood of serious harm because of the mental illness,” Maine’s law states.
Welcome said she wished there was some sort of state-based database that she could have called to alert a mental health professional that King needed a support call.
“We knew he needed some type of help,” she said.
BDN reporter Dawn Gagnon and Piscataquis Observer reporter Mike Lange contributed to this story.