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A Maine State Trooper was justified when he shot and killed a Limerick man in Old Orchard Beach last summer, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a report released last week.
The attorney general’s office investigates all instances of police using deadly force and has never found that an officer was unjustified.
The incident on July 9, 2024, started at 6:43 p.m. when Maine State Police received a request for a welfare check on a suicidal man in Cadillac Escalade at the Kennebunk Service Plaza on the Maine Turnpike, according to a summary in the AG’s report.
The man, later identified as Christopher Harriman, 38, of Limerick, was said to have an AR-15 rifle with him.
Using cellphone data, police learned that Harriman had left the service plaza and was driving toward a mobile home park where the person who had requested the welfare check lived. Notes from “computer-aided dispatch” indicated that Harriman had expressed a desire to kill specific people and had sent a photo of the AR-15 to the caller, according to the report.
Harriman reportedly almost hit a state trooper’s vehicle head-on. Another trooper caught up with Harriman on Route 1 in Saco and tried to pull him over multiple times, with lights and sirens, but he continued into the mobile home park.
He stopped his vehicle several times, according to the report, and each time the trooper got out of her vehicle with her rifle and shouted commands at him before he continued driving again. At one point, Harriman allegedly brandished the AR-15 at the trooper and she pulled the trigger in response, but her rifle malfunctioned.
The chase ended at Landry’s Shop ’n Save in Old Orchard Beach where police faced off with Harriman, who was in his vehicle. Harriman allegedly told the police off and yelled at them to shoot him, according to the report.
After coming out of his vehicle unarmed, pacing in circles and talking on his cell phone while a police negotiator tried unsuccessfully to engage him, Harriman allegedly reached back into the vehicle and grabbed the AR-15 and appeared to rack it to put a bullet in the chamber.
It was then that Trooper Ryan Phillips fired a single shot that hit Harriman in the back and killed him, according to the report.
Attorney General Frey noted that Harriman had been openly hostile to the police and had threatened them, including showing his gun to them.
“All the facts and circumstances point to the conclusion that Trooper Phillips reasonably believed he was acting in self-defense and defense of others at the time he used deadly force,” Frey wrote.
