Oxford County officials shared more details at a Monday hearing in Augusta about why they believe Sheriff Christopher Wainwright should be ousted from office for violating the law, while he continued to fight back under questioning.
It was a historic hearing as efforts to remove elected sheriffs are rare in Maine. It’s rarer still for a governor — the only one with the authority under the Maine Constitution to fire sheriffs — to pull a sheriff from office. The last time a governor appears to have approved a sheriff’s removal was in 1926 in Kennebec County.
Monday’s seven-hour administrative hearing marked the first of two scheduled days of hearings before former judge Donald Alexander, who was appointed by Gov. Janet Mills to make a recommendation on Wainwright’s removal. Mills, who was not present at the hearing, retains final decision-making power.
Amy Dieterich, an attorney for Oxford County, opened the hearing held at the Maine Department of Public Safety by describing three acts of the sheriff’s misconduct over several years that led Oxford County commissioners to ask the governor in February to remove Wainwright from office.
In 2022, Wainwright yelled at and intimidated a deputy who reported the sheriff for asking him to go easy on an acquaintance. Then, in the spring of 2023, commissioners learned he had been allowing men who were not certified as law enforcement to continue working as school resource officers. The “final straw,” she said, was when commissioners learned that he traded guns from the evidence room without conducting an auction and without first contacting the owners of the guns as required under Maine law — potentially committing theft.
The sheriff didn’t tell the commissioners about any of these acts, she said. Rather, commissioners said they learned about them from news stories by the Bangor Daily News.
In his opening statement in response, Jonathan Berry, Wainwright’s attorney, said Wainwright later apologized to Deputy Tyler Fournier whom he yelled at in a recorded call after Fournier told another deputy and his sergeant that Wainwright had asked him to fix a ticket he’d given to a woman for consuming alcohol in a vehicle on a public way.
The woman was a former classmate of Wainwright’s brother, and Wainwright had donated money to help the woman’s sister, who had terminal cancer. But she “was not a threat, was not a family member, was not a relative by marriage or blood, and it’s a real stretch to call her an acquaintance,” Berry said.
Fournier testified Monday, saying Wainwright had approached him while he was working at a football game in Dixfield and asked him to “make it right,” which he understood to mean granting the woman leniency or dismissing the ticket all together.
“I was definitely taken off guard by it. I’d never been approached like that before,” Fournier said.
After he reported the sheriff’s request up the chain of command, Wainwright called Fournier. But instead of apologizing or retracting his request, Wainwright appeared to threaten him, saying the deputy worked at his discretion.
“I don’t work for the county commissioners, and I don’t work for the chief deputy. You all work for me. And if I tell you not to write any fucking tickets ever again, you won’t write any tickets ever again, you know what I’m saying?” Wainwright told the deputy in his call, which was played at the hearing.
Fournier’s supervisor, Oxford County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Timothy Ontengco, who is certified as an ethics instructor, said his reaction to the recorded call was “disappointment, shock.” The sheriff’s office doesn’t shred tickets, he said.
In response to questions about the firearms sold from evidence, Ontengco said the sheriff’s office once held an auction around 2000 when federally licensed dealers bid on old firearms in the office’s possession. It needs to be contacting the original owners.
“Weapons have a provenance, so you have to try to find the rightful owners,” he said.
Oxford County Detective Michael Halacy, who manages the evidence room, said the sheriff directed him to collect firearms from evidence to be sold in 2021 but told him not to search for the original owners. The sheriff did not even ask him to research the origins of the 52 guns and gun parts.
“‘If somebody hasn’t called looking for them, we shouldn’t do that much work trying to find them,’” he said, summarizing what he recalled Wainwright telling him. “Because it was income for the county.”
Halacy said he had been uncomfortable with the sheriff’s directive. He talked with his supervisor about his concerns but didn’t file a formal complaint.
“There are chains of command, and mine is very low. I didn’t want any unnecessary frustrations brought down upon me for speaking out against ranking officials,” he said.
Wainwright said the commissioners granted him approval in March 2020 to purchase new service weapons for officers, less a “trade-ins allowance.” Over that year, he arranged a deal with J.T. Reid’s Gun Shop in Auburn, which took in officers’ guns and arranged for them to get new guns from distributors, all without any money changing hands.
When the sheriff’s office later gave J.T. Reid’s guns from the evidence room to sell in its store, it was part of the same deal.
“It was one continuous transaction,” Wainwright said.
While they agreed to let Wainwright trade in service weapons, commissioners never authorized him to trade in guns from evidence, according to testimony from commissioners David Duguay and Tim Turner, both of whom had supported Wainwright’s bid for sheriff in the past. Both said they now had close to zero trust in him. Conducting investigations into Wainwright had cost the county tens of thousands of dollars, and his actions had created a rift among deputies.
Turner, formerly with the Maine State Police, said he had never seen a division like the current one among employees of the sheriff’s office.
After lawyer Maria Fox produced an investigative report in December 2023 for commissioners into the sheriff’s gun deal — which found that Wainwright “violated Maine state laws regarding disposal of firearms and disposal of unclaimed property” and that his recordkeeping of the trade was “woefully deficient” — the commissioners gave Wainwright the opportunity to resign. Turner recalled that Wainwright dared them to send the letter to the governor and said he would fight it every step of the way.
Wainwright said it has “been very difficult” working with the commissioners. In terms of hiring the school resource officers, he said he wasn’t part of their interviews or selection process as they were hired by former Sheriff James Theriault in 2018. There was confusion around their status several years later, and he worked to fix it, he said.
Dieterich asked the sheriff several times under questioning whether he had pulled the school resource officers off their duties when he learned they were not certified. Eventually Wainwright confirmed that one, Percy Turner, had continued working. The other, Michael Kaspereen, was pulled from schools but was still paid and worked at the office, doing training and preparing for the certification test, the sheriff said.
