A Wales man was shot and killed in an armed confrontation with Maine state troopers early Monday morning, authorities said.
William N. Derick, 54, who lived in a mobile home at 485 Pond Road, also known as Route 132, was shot and killed by Maine State Police Trooper James MacDonald, a member of the state police tactical team, according to Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland.
Police were called Sunday night to the mobile home on a private road named Harm’s Way in Wales after a shot was fired at a woman during a domestic violence incident, McCausland said Monday morning. The woman was not injured during the incident, he said.
At about 9 p.m. Sunday, police closed Pond Road from Centre Road to Woods Road — about three-quarters of a mile — at the request of the state police, Deputy Chief Scott Dimmick of the Wales Fire Department said Monday at the intersection of Pond and Centre roads.
State police negotiators and a tactical team were dispatched to the home and attempted to make contact with Derick for several hours, McCausland said.
McCausland said an armed confrontation occurred at about 3:30 a.m. Monday between Derick and the state police tactical team in which MacDonald fatally shot Derick.
No police officers were injured in the shooting.
McCausland declined to say whether the woman lived in the home. He did say no one else was present at the time of the incident.
Lisbon police Chief Marc Hagan said Monday that he and the Sabattus Police Department each sent an officer to the scene just after 10 p.m. Sunday to back up Androscoggin County sheriff’s deputies.
The Lisbon officer “took a spot on the perimeter to make sure [the suspect] stayed in the house until state police arrived,” Hagan said.
Hagan said the woman had already left the house by the time his officer arrived.
McCausland said the Maine attorney general’s office is investigating the officer-involved shooting, as is standard procedure.
MacDonald, a seven-year veteran of the state police, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending review of the incident, McCausland said.
In September 2013, MacDonald shot a 42-year-old man in the hand in Searsmont as he attempted to serve the man with a protection from abuse order and arrest warrants, according to a September 2014 report on the use of force by the Maine Attorney General’s office, which found the shooting justified.
MacDonald shot Leonard Maker after kicking in his door and being immediately confronted by Maker, who was pointing a shotgun at the trooper’s midsection from only inches away, an affidavit stated.
McCausland said Derick’s body was taken to the Maine medical examiner’s office in Augusta for an autopsy.
About 12 houses sit along the stretch of Pond Road between Centre and Woods roads, high on a hill overlooking Sabattus Lake.
About 1,652 people live in the town, largely filled with farms and older, falling-down silos.
A woman who lives two houses away from Derick’s home and identified herself as his mother-in-law walked into her driveway around noon Monday and would say only that Derick grew up in Wales.
“I knew him since he was a boy,” she said. She declined to comment on what may have caused the incident.
This is the second officer-involved shooting so far this month. A man was fatally wounded by a state trooper during an armed confrontation outside an Oakfield grocery store on May 4. The man, John Corneil, 54, died the following day at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor.
In the moments before that shooting, Corneil allegedly challenged troopers outside the store with a handgun, which was later determined to be a pellet gun resembling a Beretta 9 mm pistol, Lt. Col. John Cote of the state police said on May 4.
In its more than 100 reviews of officer-involved shootings since 1990, the Maine attorney general’s office has never found that an officer should face criminal charges, according to a previously published report.
In March, the attorney general’s office ruled in two separate cases that state troopers and the Vassalboro police chief were legally justified in the fatal 2017 shooting of Kadhar Bailey, 25, and Ambroshia Fagre, 18, in a pickup truck that rammed a parked police cruiser in Vassalboro, and that a Portland police officer was legally justified in the 2017 shooting death of Chance David Baker, 22, at the Union Station Plaza on St. John Street where he was reportedly acting erratically and waving a long gun that was later determined to be an air rifle.
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