Members of the tactical arm of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office almost ran over their Portland counterparts and may have been intoxicated during the manhunt for the Lewiston mass shooter last October, according to a document obtained by CBS 13 through a public records request.
The allegation appears in an After Action Report written by the commander of the Portland Police Department’s Special Response Team in December 2023, in which he claims his officers were almost killed by a vehicle driven by members of Cumberland County’s Emergency Services Unit.
Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce called the claims in the report “false,” according to CBS 13.
Per the report, the Portland team was set up on a bridge in Lisbon during the search for mass shooting suspect Robert Card II on October 25, 2023, when they saw an armored vehicle heading toward them.
“It was an MRAP armored vehicle and continued to accelerate the closer it got to us,” Dt. Lt. Nick Goodman of the Portland Police Department wrote. “The MRAP continued to accelerate so we had to move our SRT Officers away from the road we had closed in fear of being run over by the armored vehicle.”
Goodman estimated the armored vehicle came within 20-30 feet of hitting the Portland team’s armored “and most likely killing a number of us.”
The Cumberland County vehicle stopped and its occupants got out. Goodman wrote that he “could smell the aroma of intoxicants [e]mitting from the vehicle” and “asked them if they, 1- saw us and 2- if they had been drinking.”
The report does not indicate if the Cumberland County team answered Goodman’s question but says they told him “in essence” they were “coming from a funeral.”
The Cumberland County Emergency Services Unit is made up of sheriff’s deputies and municipal law enforcement officers from around Cumberland County. It performs “search and rescue, high risk prisoner transport, woodland operations and warrant service,” and deals with “civil disturbance, corrections facility unrest, hostage or barricade related matters, executive protection, and incidents considered high risk which the sheriff deems relevant based on the unit’s resources and training,” according to a description on the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office website.
Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce called the allegations of intoxication and the near miss “factually incorrect” and said an internal investigation found “no indication anyone had been drinking that night,” CBS 13 reported.
“They were responding down to the area. They came around a corner and on a bridge was apparently the Portland tactical team. And, yes, they had to brake and stop, but we’re not talking about squealing tires, fish tailing, coming anywhere close to people,” Joyce said, according to CBS 13.
