BRUNSWICK, Maine — Brunswick police on Tuesday identified a convicted sex offender charged Nov. 25 with burglary and indecent conduct as a person of interest in their investigation of a sexual assault reported at Bowdoin College.
Stephen L. McIntire, 55, of Bath was arrested early Nov. 25 at his Bath home after allegedly breaking into a woman’s home, waiting for her to return, exposing himself and then chasing her upstairs before she barricaded herself in another room.
McIntire’s criminal history includes a 1997 conviction for gross sexual assault, and a 2015 conviction for burglary, violation of privacy and failure to comply with the sex offender registry. In the 2015 case, he was convicted of violating “Peeping Tom” laws after police said video cameras caught him “peeping” in windows on the Hyde School campus in Bath.
Brunswick Police Cmdr. Mark Waltz said Tuesday that McIntire is among a number of “persons of interest” identified by police in their investigation of a Nov. 10 sexual assault report by a Bowdoin student at the college’s Mayflower Apartments on Belmont Street.
“We certainly have other people we’re talking to, but he’s a person of interest,” Waltz said, adding that police have “looked significantly into at least one other person.”
McIntire was identified as matching a composite sketch released of a man seen loitering outside the apartment complex on Nov. 10, Waltz said, although he added that the witness who described that suspect saw him from 50 to 75 feet away.
Brunswick police are also investigating McIntire’s potential involvement in a Sept. 21 incident in which officers went to a Harpswell Street home after Bowdoin students reported a man was on a second-floor fire escape looking in windows.
“The coincidence hasn’t escaped us,” Waltz said of the Hyde School incident, but he added that a number of cases similar to the Harpswell Street case were only reported to Bowdoin security and not to Brunswick police.
Waltz confirmed that McIntire did attend a support group for sex offenders that, until recently, met Tuesday nights at the First Parish Church in Brunswick, just off the Bowdoin campus. Following the Nov. 10 incident and a subsequent incident in which a student was grabbed by a man on a nearby street — both on Tuesday nights — the church rescinded the group’s permission to meet there at the request of Bowdoin officials.
For the alleged Bath incident, police charged McIntire with Class C felony burglary and aggravated criminal trespass, as well as misdemeanor criminal threatening, indecent conduct and theft.
McIntire is no longer required to register as a sex offender, according to police.
He remains at Two Bridges Regional Jail, held on $10,000 cash bail.