A midcoast newspaper is going to court to seek records from the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office related to the teen who allegedly killed Sunshine “Sunny” Stewart while she was out paddleboarding in Union this summer.
The Midcoast Villager is seeking records of any calls police made in the two and a half years before the killing to the Frankfort home where the suspect, 17-year-old Deven Young, had lived with his family.
In a legal appeal filed Friday in Kennebec County Superior Court, the Villager accused the sheriff’s office of failing to adequately respond to information requests made under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act.
In response to those requests, the sheriff’s office has “failed even to confirm whether responsive records exist, much less provide all or any of them — even in redacted form,” the legal action claims.
Waldo County Sheriff Jason Trundy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We aren’t going to court simply because the Waldo County Sheriff’s department denied any old request, but because these calls for service could help our efforts to come to a better understanding of who Deven Young was leading up to this summer,” said Willy Blackmore, editor in chief of the Villager. “These are not only public records, but public records that are in the public interest to have access to — that’s why we’re turning to the courts to get them released.”
The Midcoast Villager is a media partner of the Bangor Daily News. It is represented by the Portland attorneys Sigmund Schutz and Alexandra Harriman. Schutz is also the attorney for the BDN.
Stewart, who was 48, was found dead July 3 after she’d gone out paddleboarding on Crawford Pond in Union the previous day. Her killing shocked many in the midcoast, where she had spent much of her life and had a home in Tenants Harbor.
It took authorities two weeks to arrest and charge Young with intentional or knowing or depraved indifference murder in Knox County Juvenile Court. He had been staying at the same campground in Union where Stewart was before her death. Court records in his case have now been sealed pending a determination of his competency to stand trial.
In its legal complaint, the Villager’s attorneys said that records on previous police visits to Young’s home could “shed light on whether there was an opportunity for law enforcement or other relevant Maine authorities to have intervened in a way that could have prevented the murder of Ms. Stewart.”
A reporter from the Villager first requested information on July 21 about police calls to Young’s home in Frankfort, according to the complaint. In response, the county responded that it had checked for records but “did not find any publicly releasable materials.”
The Villager then pressed the sheriff’s office to confirm whether it had any relevant records and filed a FOAA request on Aug. 14, but received a similar response.
In its complaint, the newspaper argued that the FOAA law does not allow “law enforcement to refuse to confirm the existence or absence of confidential intelligence and investigative record information.” It noted that all the records it’s seeking are from before July 2 and, thus, only relate to police activity from before Stewart’s killing.
The paper is asking the court to expedite its case, declare the records it’s seeking to be public, declare that Waldo County violated the FOAA law and order the county to provide a list of each record that’s responsive to the original request as well as a legal citation for it not being public.
The Villager is also asking the court to do its own review of records withheld by the county; to order the county to make the records sought by the paper available for inspection; and to make the county reimburse the paper’s legal fees.
