BRUNSWICK, Maine — John Raio had just locked up his gym Friday night and was driving home when he got a call from one of his clients.
“He said he got jumped on his way to his car by someone with white face paint who looked like a homeless mime,” Raio, owner of First Class Fitness and MMA in Fort Andross, said Tuesday. “He was really shaken up.”
But the mime preyed on the wrong guy that night: Raio’s client, 23-year-old Dominic Jones, is a mixed martial arts fighter training with Raio for his first professional fight, at the Lewiston Colisee on April 29.
Jones, 23, was standing behind his truck when the man “grabbed me and turned me around,” he said Tuesday. “I threw him to the ground, hit him — with a right cross — and he got up and ran off.”
The man “looked like a mime,” Jones said. “It was really dark and his face was white, like paint. It sounds funny and all, but that’s what I saw.”
Raio’s wife called Brunswick police later that night, but a police officer who searched the area found nothing, Brunswick police Cmdr. Mark Waltz said.
“I thought it was a joke at first,” Raio said of the phone call, adding that
he’s never heard of anything like it in the four years since he opened the gym in the former mill complex.
Jones, who is from Orange Park, Florida, but now lives in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, and drives two hours each way to train with Raio, said he was bewildered by the encounter — and he hopes the man is OK.
Police have not received other reports involving men in white face paint and black clothing, Waltz said.