MLLINOCKET, Maine — The McDonald’s on Route 11 is a loud place when busy, but Jesse Dumais doesn’t need to raise his voice to be heard.
At 6 foot 2 and 310 pounds, Dumais is the largest presence in the fast-food restaurant he manages, especially when he’s doing dining room chores or sharing a smile or laugh with his customers.
It’s these qualities that prompted about a dozen elderly coffee club regulars to encourage Dumais to seek another title: town councilor. He’s on the Nov. 3 ballot.
“They said, ‘Jesse, you should run for office. You should take out your papers,’” Dumais said. “They have confidence in me. They have seen a likeability about me. I’m easy to talk to. I don’t shy away from conversations with anybody. I get engaged. I show a genuine interest in what those specific townspeople want to talk about.”
The 40-year-old Dumais wasn’t so confident 20 years ago. Back then, he was an angry young man whose imposing size, volatility and bad choices led to his conviction in 1998 of conspiracy to commit murder, in what then-Superior Court Justice Paul T. Pierson called one of the most severe assault cases he’d ever seen in Aroostook County.
For Dumais, the run for council in Millinocket is also a referendum about how he has changed his life, and the person he is today.
He served eight years of a 10-year prison sentence and was released in 2005. The memory of who he was, and what he did, to land him in prison still brings tears to his eyes and a tremor to his voice.
“What bothers me the most about this stuff is I was beat up and picked on a lot when I was a kid. I was smaller then,” Dumais said. “I even told the judge, ‘What bothers me the most is that I became the same thing I hated.’
“I am not proud of it. I really am not,” he added. “I have kids, and I know now if somebody treated them the way I was treated, and the way I treated weaker people …”
Dumais looked away.
“I wish I had the wisdom then that I have now,” Dumais said, “but I didn’t.”
‘He paid his price’
Bert Moody is among the coffee regulars at the Route 11 McDonald’s who encouraged Dumais to seek office.
“We encouraged him to run, this coffee group,” the 75-year-old retired millworker said. “He wants to try to create jobs, make this town grow. We got behind him and encouraged him, said, ‘Take out nomination papers. Give it a shot.’ That’s what he has done and I backed him all the way.”
Moody is aware of Dumais’ criminal record, but doesn’t think it should have any impact on voters.
“He paid his price. It was a long time ago and he has made a better person of himself,” Moody said. “What do we want to do? Tear him down? He made a mistake. And he has proved himself. I have no issue with that. He is a fine young man. I support him all the way.”
Town Councilor Michael Madore agreed that Dumais’ record shouldn’t be held against him. Although it typically takes a good year or so for a freshman councilor to get a handle on the job, Dumais has a good grasp of issues, Madore said.
“I am one who believes in giving second chances,” Madore said. “He has been very active in the community, he has a young child and he is very settled down. I just think that people change and I think, after having met with him and talked to him, I find him to be not asking for forgiveness or explaining himself, but he is saying he is not the man that he was.”
Millinocket, Moody said, desperately needs people like Dumais — younger folks not set in their ways who are hardworking, successful and open-minded enough to fix things.
The town’s population plunged from 7,742 to 4,466 between 1970 and 2010 and is expected to fall to 3,531 by 2020. The town’s unemployment rate hovers close to 25 percent. Its $29.66 property tax rate is one of the highest in the state, and the largest single investor to come along in 10 years, New Hampshire-based Cate Street Capital, last year sold off parts of the town’s shuttered paper mill to make delinquent tax payments after promising to revitalize the region with a $140 million pellet mill that has yet to appear.
“We have had a lot of carpetbaggers come in here. They get the public all pumped up and then the next thing, a year and a half later, you’re right back in the hole again,” Moody said. “The taxpayers in this community are getting hit on the chin.
“The 75-year-olds and the people that are retired, we are all set in our ways,” Moody added. “We have to change from a factory-oriented community that gave us all a great life but isn’t here anymore. It’s got to change so that school-age children who are graduating here have the opportunity to stay where they have lived all their lives.”
‘This is for Dumais’
Jesse Dumais was a rather stressed out 21-year-old in 1997. He was a part-time member of the U.S. Army National Guard and worked jobs at Kentucky Fried Chicken and Burger King in Houlton. His first wife and their young daughter were living in North Carolina, and having his first child so far away left him feeling adrift and miserable, he said.
“I was not a happy person. I didn’t live a lifestyle that was really meaningful,” Dumais said.
Dumais was also a petty criminal. He had been convicted of a string of misdemeanors in Houlton and Millinocket in 1994 and 1995 and spent 35 days in jail and paid $950 in fines for those crimes, court records indicate.
He admits hanging with a rough crowd with a kind of vigilante code. “We didn’t go to the cops for anything,” Dumais said. “If we had a problem with somebody, we took care of it ourselves.”
So, at a party in Houlton on Jan. 24, 1997, when Dumais heard 17-year-old Benjamin Sickles had been badmouthing him, Dumais and some friends went to Sickles’ home, took him back to the party and beat him for almost three hours.
Sickles was tied to a chair, kicked and punched, his eyebrows removed with depilatory cream and his hair set afire. For that, the Aroostook County grand jury handed up 11 charges of kidnapping, aggravated assault, assault and terrorizing against Dumais. Another 22-year-old Houlton man, Michael Pelkey, was also indicted.
Dumais said he punched Sickles several times, but left for work before Sickles was shaved and burned.
That does not absolve him of responsibility, he said.
“Was what happened right? No. Did it go too far? Yes. I don’t condone what my co-defendants or I did,” Dumais said.
Eleven months after the assault on Sickles, Dumais said he got a telephone call from a 19-year-old Houlton friend, Sean Eriksen, who said he was moving to Florida to get away from the police and wondered if Dumais needed a favor.
Dumais did. He said it would be good if Sickles didn’t testify against him in a probation revocation hearing in Houlton District Court.
“I told him to scare him,” Dumais said. “He slashed [Sickles’] throat and then he stole a car” from the Millinocket Regional Hospital parking lot and went to Florida.
Sickles needed 38 stitches. Dumais and Eriksen were both charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Police said Eriksen, who received an 11-year sentence, told Sickles during the assault, “This is for Dumais.”
‘I did not want that lifestyle’
The sentencing, Dumais said, was among the most harrowing experiences of his life. Standing before Pierson, Dumais wept as he apologized for his actions. And prison, and the exposure to criminals much more hardened than himself, gave Dumais time to think about the course of his life.
“I made a decision very, very early on in my life in prison that I did not want that lifestyle. Everybody else I was with had much more [prison] time than me,” Dumais recalled. “I kept seeing people come in and out, in and out. I thought, once you are in the system, how do you not value your freedom that much?”
Dumais kept a clean record during his seven years at Maine State Prison in Warren. He qualified for a work release program that allowed him to assemble part of the stage at the National Folk Festival in Bangor in 2004. And he thought hard, he said, about what he had done.
“I begged God to give me a chance at some point and said I will never put myself in that situation again,” Dumais said. “I learned very early that this [prison] was not for me. A lot of people think I went to college and I tell them that prison was my college.”
“I feel like I got stuff to live for today. I have my family. I didn’t have any family back then,” Dumais added in reference to his fiancee, Michelle Stanley, and son Lucien. “My outlook on life is, I am very regretful for the positions I put myself in. I am sorry that I was not there for my daughter. I did a lot of soul searching.”
‘I think it torments him’
Benjamin Sickles hasn’t forgotten Jesse Dumais.
Now 36, Sickles is a journeyman roofer. For the most part, he said, he’s put the two assaults he endured behind him.
“I don’t think I will ever fully mentally heal from that, but as far as being able to not dwell on it, I think I have done pretty well,” Sickles said.
Sickles has no pain from the assaults, but does have post-traumatic stress disorder. That manifests itself, he said, “in that it makes me unable to trust people fully. I have very few friends that I actually trust.”
Sickles hasn’t been back in Houlton or the Katahdin region since 1999. He declined to say where he lives now. He doesn’t believe Dumais is a threat to him, but believes others involved in the assault might be.
“I still feel like I have people coming after me,” Sickles said.
His family’s last brush with Dumais came about five years ago, when Sickles’ mother saw him at a local grocery store.
“He literally backed out the door and went outside because he didn’t want to confront her,” Sickles said. “When you have done all that time in jail that he has and he thinks about what he had done, honestly, I think it torments him. I think it torments him that he almost took another person’s life.”
Sickles and Dumais, however, have recently become Facebook friends, at Dumais’ request, and have communicated via instant messaging. Dumais said he contacted Sickles because he wants to help him heal and knew his run for council might draw attention to Sickles and his family.
Sickles said that he could tell from the tone of Dumais’ voice during their brief phone conversation, and from Dumais’ Facebook page, that his former tormenter is not the same man who targeted him 18 years ago.
“Back then we were all kids,” Sickles said. “He has been a manager at McDonald’s and you don’t make manager unless you stick around. It means he has the initiative and drive to succeed.”
That Dumais’ fiancee, Michelle Stanley, suffers from breast cancer also tells Sickles a great deal. “Just from that alone, I can tell he has changed a lot. And for him to be able to deal with that, that’s a strong man,” Sickles said.
Would he vote for Dumais? Sickles isn’t sure. He did say he hopes that Dumais’ criminal record doesn’t influence voters.
“I have forgiven him. I don’t want to cause any kind of interference,” Sickles said. “I think he paid his debts to society. At this point he seems like a changed man.”
Dumais hopes his run for council can prove that.
“I have seen the worst. I know where the dark side is.” Dumais said. “I don’t want to seem cliche, but I believe that when you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s nowhere else to go but look up. And for the last 20 years, I have done nothing but look up.”