A former Bar Harbor police officer has been indicted in Hancock County on a misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child.
Larry Fickett, who last worked for the Bar Harbor Police Department in 2016, was arrested last May at his home in Ellsworth on multiple charges including sexual exploitation of a minor, possession of child pornography and endangering the welfare of a child.
It was not clear Friday why Fickett, 42, was indicted on only the one misdemeanor endangering charge and not on the other two, which are felonies. Hancock County District Attorney Bob Granger did not respond Friday to a request for comment on Fickett’s case.
Fickett is accused of endangering the child for approximately 10 months in 2023, during which time the child turned 6 years old, according to the indictment filed in court. He allegedly violated “a duty of care of protection” by providing the child with a cellphone that “had access to a cloud-based platform containing adult images and videos which were inappropriate for a child,” prosecutors wrote in the document.
Jeffrey Toothaker, Fickett’s defense attorney, said Friday that a judge in a related matter determined that photos in Fickett’s possession did not constitute child pornography and that the child endangerment misdemeanor is the only charge remaining against his client.
He said Fickett plans to plead no contest to the misdemeanor charge next week and to be sentenced to time served, which was only “a day or two” that he spent in jail after his arrest last May.
Further details about the allegations were unavailable Friday. All other documents in the case remain impounded under a judge’s order and are not available to the public, according to a court clerk.
Before he worked for Bar Harbor, Fickett also previously worked as a patrolman with the Presque Isle Police Department and as a deputy with the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department.
According to a 2016 article in the Mount Desert Islander newspaper, Fickett resigned from his patrol job in February of that year after being suspended for three days without pay. He had been suspended after an internal investigation for dishonesty and conduct unbecoming a civil servant, the Islander reported.
James Willis, then Bar Harbor’s police chief, authorized the investigation after receiving a complaint from another law enforcement agency about Fickett reportedly asking one of its officers to leave information out of a report, according to the article.
Fickett, who had joined the Bar Harbor department in September 2012, also received a written reprimand in November 2014, the newspaper reported. In that case, he violated a department order by using the lights and sirens on a police cruiser while responding to a non-emergency situation.
