TRENTON, Maine — A man whose truck went out of control and contributed to an accident that resulted in a traffic jam Friday afternoon on Route 3 was arrested later that night.
Gregory Gilley, 27, of Ellsworth was arrested about 7:45 p.m. after Bangor police spotted the white 1999 Jeep that Gilley stole from the Bar Harbor Golf Club to make a getaway, Lt. Chris Thornton of the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office said Friday night.
Gilley is charged with leaving the scene of a personal injury accident, driving to endanger, unauthorized use of property and violating the conditions of his release from a previous, unrelated arrest. He also was wanted on a warrant for failure to appear, Thornton said.
Thornton said that Gilley initially was taken to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor but that he later would be taken to the Penobscot County Jail, where he would be held without bail on a probation hold.
Route 3 was shut down for more than two hours, with traffic between Ellsworth and Mount Desert Island rerouted along Bayside, Goose Cove and Oak Point roads, while emergency responders checked on other motorists involved in the collision and then removed three damaged trucks from the road.
The collision occurred just before 3 p.m. when Gilley, driving a GMC Sierra pickup truck, aggressively pulled out of a dirt road while turning right onto Route 3 toward Ellsworth, causing the vehicle to fishtail in the roadway, according to Thornton.
A North Carolina man driving a Ford pickup truck heading south on Route 3 toward MDI stopped out of caution when he saw the GMC come close to careening out of control, he said.
A flatbed truck owned by NewLand Nursery of Ellsworth and towing a backhoe on a trailer was following the Ford pickup too closely, according to Deputy Jacob Day, who is the lead investigator in the incident. The flatbed truck rear-ended the Ford, swerved into the opposite lane and struck the GMC truck head-on, he said.
The front end of the flatbed truck came to rest against the guardrail on the southbound side of the road, with the body sticking out across the southbound lane, while the demolished GMC truck was blocking the northbound lane of traffic, making the road completely impassable.
Thornton said a witness initially told police that Gilley had hopped into another vehicle that had stopped in the resulting gridlock. The information turned out not to be true and hindered efforts by police to quickly find and apprehend the man, he said.
About 45 minutes after the crash, police received a report of a white Jeep being stolen from Bar Harbor Golf Club on Route 204, and officers established that Gilley was the suspect in the vehicle theft, Thornton said.
A passenger in the GMC truck — later identified as Christopher Lane — was injured in the crash and taken to Maine Coast Memorial Hospital for treatment, police said.
Police declined to release the names of any of the drivers or passengers in the other vehicles.
The rear end of the Ford pickup truck and the front end of the NewLand truck were significantly damaged in the collision.
BDN writer Dawn Gagnon contributed to this report.
