Three deputies, including a Nov. 3 election opponent, have accused Oxford County Sheriff Christopher Wainwright of retaliating against them for cooperating in a misconduct probe that led to a high-profile attempt to remove him from office.
Wainwright’s challenger, Deputy Justin Brown, along with Deputy Richard Murray and Cpl. Timothy Ontengco, filed whistleblower complaints with the Maine Human Rights Commission last month, marking the first step toward a possible lawsuit. The officers also claim that county officials failed to protect them when they reported the retaliation and requested an investigation.
The allegations renew scrutiny of Wainwright’s tenure, which began in 2019 and has drawn multiple Bangor Daily News investigations into ethical lapses, including pressuring a deputy to go easy on an acquaintance, trading guns from the evidence locker in violation of state rules, and allowing uncertified deputies to work as school resource officers.
A county investigation into that conduct prompted commissioners to take the rare step of asking Gov. Janet Mills to remove Wainwright from office, something no governor has done here since 1926. She called his conduct unprofessional in a 2024 decision but said voters should decide his fate. The Republican sheriff is facing Brown, an independent, in this year’s election after narrowly beating him in 2022.
The deputies’ new complaints, which are not yet public but were shared by the BDN by lawyers representing the men, describe a pattern of escalating discipline and harassment that began before the removal proceedings and intensified afterward. They also outlined the attempts they made to get county officials to intervene.
“Our clients went into law enforcement because they care deeply about fair treatment under the law for everyone, without regard to personal connections,” Ali Garmey Chardon, one of three lawyers representing the officers, said. “They are simply asking for that fair treatment, but instead are being punished for reporting misconduct. That’s neither fair nor legal, and it doesn’t represent a professional law enforcement culture.”
Michael Cunniff, another lawyer for the officers, denied that Brown’s complaint was politically motivated, saying that his effort to request protection from retaliation began in 2025, “well before the 2026 election process began.”
Reached for comment, Wainwright had yet to review the complaints as of Wednesday afternoon. He said state law limited what he could say about personnel matters and that he didn’t believe it was appropriate to litigate them or political disagreements in the media.
“I am confident that the facts will speak for themselves through the appropriate process,” he wrote in a text message. “It sounds to me like a political hit job by my opponent six weeks before the election.”
Chief Deputy James Urquhart and Maj. Dana Thompson, who are also named respondents, did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.
All three officers had clean discipline records before the events described in their complaints, they said.
For Ontengco, a former sergeant who joined the department in 1991, that changed in November 2021 after he questioned why a colleague under FBI investigation had been allowed to stay on duty, according to his complaint.
Less than a week later, he was reprimanded for failing to fault Murray over a paperwork issue related to a drowning, a move he believed was meant to punish Murray for grieving a denied promotion. (Both officers grieved their discipline and it was later overturned, they said.)
Ontengco’s access to the district attorney’s server was cut without explanation, he said, and the sheriff began tracking his cruiser’s GPS and questioning his movements. A new rule requiring two weeks’ notice for time off, he and Murray said, seemed to apply only to them. (Murray challenged Wainwright as a write-in candidate during the 2022 Republican primary.)
In November 2022, Brown, Murray and two other deputies raised ethical concerns about Wainwright — missing evidence-locker firearms, uncertified school resource officers, selective discipline and surveillance, untruthfulness — with then-County Administrator Don Durrah, who died in 2023. He told them the county would follow up.
Soon after, a deputy told Ontengco that Wainwright had pressured him to dismiss a traffic ticket for a woman he’d grown up with, and Ontengco reported it to Urquhart. The BDN later reported on an audio recording of the sheriff’s phone call with the deputy, prompting Wainwright to apologize publicly.
During an interview with the county’s attorney, Ontengco learned Wainwright had been told he and others were considered whistleblowers.
“At the time, this surprised me; being a whistleblower was the last thing on my mind,” he wrote in his complaint. He told the lawyer that believed Wainwright would retaliate against him based on his treatment over the previous year, he wrote.
What followed Mills’ decision to keep the sheriff in office, Murray wrote, was an “unrelenting” wave of internal investigations and discipline. In most cases, the officers included explanations for why they believed their punishments were targeted and unfair.
Ontengco cites several examples of ongoing harassment that he eventually reported to the county’s human resource officer in June 2024, including having to wait nearly a year for a working radio and being the only sergeant whose reports required the chief deputy’s sign-off. He went to HR after he was placed on leave over a complaint that he was later cleared of, he wrote.
The following year, he received a negative performance review that cited his whistleblower status, which was also how he learned that his supervisors failed to notify him that he had been the subject of an internal affairs investigation about his leadership. He was suspended 14 days over policy violations related to his high-speed pursuit of a motorcycle that resulted in a fatal crash, then demoted to corporal and suspended three more days after Wainwright cited GPS data to accuse him of spending too much time parked in his cruiser.
Murray was suspended multiple times over a parking complaint, a missed training and an insubordination finding. Meanwhile, he refers to a colleague who got frustrated and “walked off the job” for a week and wasn’t disciplined. Murray was demoted from corporal to deputy and remains on a performance improvement plan.
Brown was demoted from detective lieutenant to deputy in 2025 for policy violations related to a justified shooting that involved 11 officers from five agencies, including four from Oxford County. Brown claimed that Wainwright and Thompson singled him out for punishment, including a 30-day suspension without pay.
Brown has not worked since last October, when he was accused of mishandling a service weapon and placed on indefinite leave after a local prosecutor questioned his truthfulness. The Maine Criminal Justice Academy dismissed that truthfulness complaint in July for lack of evidence in a case Brown said could have cost him his certification — and therefore his spot on the ballot against Wainwright. The sheriff suspended him without pay for 90 days in August over the earlier gun allegation.
All three say they repeatedly reported the alleged retaliation to the county, requesting an independent investigation and citing a state law that lets commissioners review and overturn unwarranted discipline. They filed a workplace bullying complaint under sheriff’s office policy that should have triggered a probe on its own, according to the complaints.
Neither the county administrator nor the commissioners meaningfully responded, according to the complaints. The county attorney advised the board to wait for the union grievance process to play out first, they said. Only one of the three commissioners who sought Wainwright’s removal, Timothy Turner, remains on the board.
Turner, as well as Lisa Keim and Sawin Millett, both former Republican lawmakers who joined the board in 2025, did not respond to individual requests for comment.
County Administrator Zane Loper, who was hired in August 2024, sent the BDN a statement on their behalf which said they “take these complaints seriously” and would offer no other comment at this time.
A Maine Human Rights Commission complaint triggers an investigation to determine whether the officers have grounds to sue in state or federal court. Brown has also lodged complaints with the sheriff’s department and Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey this year for unlawful eavesdropping during his untruthfulness investigation, having claimed that Thompson obtained a recording of a phone call that was illegally intercepted. A similar complaint to the criminal justice academy was dismissed on Sept. 4 for insufficient evidence, records show.
This is not the first time Wainwright has been accused of retaliation. In 2024, the county settled a sex-discrimination lawsuit brought by a former clerk who alleged that Wainwright had fired her after she reported her concerns.
He is also not the first Oxford County sheriff to weather misconduct allegations. His predecessor, Wayne Gallant, resigned from office in 2017 over a sexual harassment scandal. Wainwright, who then led the office’s criminal investigation division, was tied to an FBI investigation into Gallant that resulted in no charges and he emerged as a leader in the office afterward.
Wainwright is active in Republican politics. He is an honorary town chair of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ reelection campaign, and his daughter is a former Collins staffer. He appeared alongside former Gov. Paul LePage, a 2nd Congressional District candidate, at a Monday news conference in Augusta.