EASTPORT, Maine — State and local police continue to investigate the suspicious death of a local man whose body was found in his home last week.
An autopsy was done on the body of 75-year-old Maurice “Allen” Harris at the state medical examiner’s office but more work needs to be done to determine the cause of death, according to Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland.
“Detectives say the death is suspicious because there are questions that have not been resolved and they continue to seek those answers,” McCausland said in a news release issued Monday morning.
“Additional work remains to determine the cause of death,” according to McCausland.
Detectives say Harris lived alone in his house on Clark Street and had lived in Eastport since he moved to town with his parents 45 years ago.
Summer residents Bev and Don Bley, who live two doors down from Harris, said Saturday they didn’t see or hear anything suspicious Thursday night.
The couple said Harris was a very quiet neighbor. They knew him about 12 years.
“I can’t imagine anybody would have anything negative to say,” Don Bley said.
Bev Bley said Harris was “not anti-social. He just liked his privacy.”
The couple and Harris exchanged waves and said “Hi” when they saw each other, the Bleys said.
“I feel badly we didn’t take him any brownies or something the whole time he was here,” Don Bley said.
Local sculptor Richard Klyver said Friday he and Harris used to work together at Peregrine Associates. Klyver fashioned small pewter pieces, sometimes as limited edition works, and Harris did the finishing work to polish them up.
He said Harris was “extremely good” at what he did for Peregrine Associates.
Harris’ work with Peregrine Associates was an “important part of his creative life,” said Eastport resident Gregory Biss, who had known Harris about 40 years.
Harris had moved to Eastport in the early 1970s from New York City, Klyver said. Harris lived by himself and also made dulcimers by hand, he said, producing “unbelievably good” work. Harris, he added, was self-taught.
“He was a very skilled craftsman [but] he was not easy to get along with,” Klyver said, adding he lost touch with Harris several years ago.
Joanne McMahon of Cooper said Friday that Harris was prone to emotional highs and lows. She said that, even though he could be gruff, he also could be quite compassionate.
“He and my husband [William McMahon] grew up together in Queens, New York,” she said, adding her husband passed away in 2003. “He really was a great person. Very unusual.”
Harris had been a social worker in New York City prior to moving to Eastport, McMahon said.
“Finally, it got to him and he burned out and couldn’t take it any longer,” McMahon said of Harris’ prior career in New York City. “He was sensitive to other people.”
When her husband passed away 12 years ago, she added, Harris “cried hard for a long time.”
McMahon echoed Klyver’s view of Harris’ craftsmanship, saying he made “beautiful, beautiful” dulcimers. He was an accomplished carpenter, she added, having worked for decades on his house, which she said was a “shell” when he bought it.
“He worked constantly on his house, which is still in an unfinished state,” she said.
Biss’ wife, Barbara Smith, said Harris did carpentry work for her.
“He spent a really long time doing it because he was such a perfectionist,” she said. Despite the time he had invested, he still gave her a good price.
Smith also remembered that while Harris was single with no children, he loved Smith’s children, especially when they were babies.
“He just loved to hold them,” she said.
Biss and Mark DeVoto, an Eastport summer resident, said Harris loved music.
Biss called Harris a “heavy-duty music lover. He was famous for walking around town and picking up trash with an earbud and probably what was going on in the earbud was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.”
DeVoto said Harris started getting heavy and decided to exercise, walking every day for about 10 years.
Harris was very private and, though he lived right in town and frequently walked all over Eastport, he sometimes would not answer his phone or his door, McMahon said.
“I think most people would say he was kind of a recluse,” Biss said.
“We liked him very much even though he was rough hewn,” said DeVoto, who described Harris as “solitary … But he had a lot of friends in town.”
Both Klyver and Biss said Harris was well known for stopping the Pittston oil refinery from coming to town in the 1970s.
Harris led a “spirited political movement against it,” Biss said. “That was a really important achievement for him.”
“He was more responsible than anyone else for keeping them out,” Klyver said.
Harris went door to door with a petition and accumulated more than 700 signatures, Klyver said.
Biss said Harris got people from away involved in the fight, “a gesture that was very much respected and remembered.”
Eastport artist Elizabeth Ostrander remembered Harris as a person who loved the community and expressed his love from behind the scenes.
Years ago, Harris and other artists bought land intending it to be an arts center, she said.
“We just were so busy just staying alive, we didn’t have time or resources to activate what we wanted to,” she said.
As a result, the land was sold and, at the suggestion of Harris, money from the proceeds was given to the fledgeling Eastport Gallery.
“He thought our gallery should have a computer,” Ostrander said. In addition to the computer, Harris gave the gallery a camera so that other works not in the gallery could be marketed.
“This was really his way of expressing his love of community,” she said.
She also remembers Harris enjoyed playing with local children.
She said his death was “heartbreaking” and “a tragedy.”
McMahon also was “shocked and devastated” when she heard he died.
“He could have lived to be 100,” she said. “He might have had many years ahead of him.”
Leslie Bowman, who said she lives “in the region,” brought flowers and left them in front of his house. She was too emotional to talk Saturday.
BDN writer Bill Trotter contributed to this report.