The sheriff directed his detective to complete an unusual task: gather guns from the office’s evidence room to be sold.
The detective did as he was ordered. On June 8, 2021, Detective Michael Halacy emailed the sheriff a list of guns he had confirmed were not stolen.
It wasn’t enough. Oxford County Sheriff Christopher Wainwright told Halacy to collect more guns from evidence for the sale, including a Walther PP 9 mm pistol, according to internal sheriff’s office reports. It had a well-documented history: Dixfield police had recovered it after it had been stolen.
Instead of asking Halacy to try to return it to its rightful owner, Wainwright sold it and dozens of other guns in a deal that has avoided public scrutiny, even by Oxford County’s financial officers, until now. An outside expert said the situation should prompt an independent investigation.
In two separate batches, in June and September 2021, the sheriff sold a total of 52 guns and gun parts from evidence to J.T. Reid’s Gun Shop in Auburn as part of a deal that he apparently did not record on paper. He did not tell the county administrator, the county treasurer or the county commissioners about the sale beforehand even though they are responsible for county finances.
What the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office received in return for the guns is not clear. After phone calls and emails to the sheriff over a period of a month asking for an explanation about where the money went, he said Thursday in an email that all proceeds went to purchasing “equipment for the county.” He did not elaborate in response to further questions.
Some of the guns Wainwright sold from evidence appeared to have been lost or abandoned, and others were seized in criminal investigations or collected after suicides. But for many of the guns, the sheriff’s office didn’t have a record of their origins, raising questions about whether the sheriff had the authority to sell them at all given legal restrictions on disposing of evidence.
The revelations about the gun deal come at a tenuous time for the sheriff, who was recently investigated after a deputy reported him for asking the deputy to go easy on a woman cited for a traffic violation. Someone recorded the sheriff then overstating his authority and yelling at the deputy for expressing his unease with the request.
The Oxford County commissioners ultimately decided in May to give Wainwright a second chance and not recommend that he be removed from office. Commissioners control county budgets and hiring, but they cannot discipline elected sheriffs. Only the governor can remove a sheriff.
But the commissioners issued a warning: If the sheriff fell short of his pledge to improve or engaged in further conduct unbefitting of his office, they would revisit their decision to not send a complaint to the governor.
Soon after their decision, the Bangor Daily News uncovered that the sheriff had outfitted two men with guns and badges to work as school resource officers in local schools despite the fact that the men were not certified as law enforcement.
“We have reeled in our sheriff, so right now he’s walking a thin line, and he knows that,” said Commissioner David Duguay, who was also in his elected role in 2017 when commissioners asked the former governor to remove then-Oxford County Sheriff Wayne Gallant from office for sexual misconduct.
“Just like past sheriffs, I think he’s taken a lot of liberties that they should not take,” Duguay said of Wainwright. “They need to recognize that the commissioners hold the purse strings. There are some sheriffs in the state, I believe, that think they’re above the law.”
The BDN confirmed the sale of guns from evidence through public records requests starting last October. At first, the county provided incomplete records pointing only to a trade of guns with J.T. Reid’s in 2020, as the county administrator said he did not know about the second deal in 2021. It took three public records requests over nine months for the county to find the only apparent recorded confirmation of the 2021 sale.
The details were not logged in financial books but in police records maintained to track evidence. Halacy recorded when guns were removed from evidence and described how the sheriff arranged for them to be sold to J.T. Reid’s.
The county provided the BDN with copies of reports describing the chain of custody for the guns and, if it was known, the associated case, which made it possible to see how some of the guns ended up in evidence. Of those with details, the records show the sheriff’s office received the guns between 2006 and 2020. They included a variety of models, including a Mossberg 20-gauge shotgun, a .22-caliber Remington Nylon 66 rifle and a silver-colored .25-caliber Phoenix Arms pistol.
In addition to the recovered Dixfield handgun, the sheriff asked Halacy in June 2021 to pull other guns to be sold, according to Halacy’s reports, including two guns recovered from separate unattended deaths in Waterford and Stoneham in 2018; a broken rifle that a man used to smash a counter during a domestic violence incident in Sweden, Maine, in 2019; and a shotgun discovered 10 feet into the woodline by a hunter from Sumner in 2020.
In his email, Wainwright said the majority of guns removed from evidence for “disposal or destruction” in 2021 were weapons used in the commission of a crime or involved in a traumatic event. They were not returned to offenders who were unable to legally possess them due to mental health concerns or substance use, or because they had been convicted of domestic violence or a felony, he said. He did not say who determined the guns were fit to sell or why he didn’t get permission from commissioners ahead of time.
Some firearms were destroyed because they had an altered or removed serial number, or a sawed-off barrel, he said.
The county treasurer’s office needs to know about the sale of any property to be as transparent with the public about finances as possible, said Beth Calhoun, Oxford County’s elected treasurer.
“But obviously that’s challenging when there is an effort to make an end run around proper financial practices,” she said. “I firmly believe we are always answerable and should be able to answer any question that’s asked about how money came in and how it was spent. Once you can’t do that, everything is in question.”
The commissioners gave Wainwright approval in March 202 0 to trade in old service weapons to buy new guns for officers, according to meeting minutes. While there were no receipts to verify the deal, the sheriff said he completed the trade with J.T. Reid’s, which accepted the old service weapons and some guns from evidence to sell in its store. It then bought new guns on behalf of the sheriff’s office. No cash changed hands, the store’s manager confirmed, writing out two memos to the county administrator to explain what happened.
Details about the next deal, in 2021, have been more scarce. When the BDN began asking questions, Oxford County Administrator Donald Durrah contacted J.T. Reid’s to ask for records of the deal. He received an unsigned slip with two different dates on it from the store saying it accepted the guns and assorted parts from evidence in exchange for giving the sheriff’s office $5,300 in credit. It did not provide documentation for how the credit had been applied, Durrah said, but there was no credit left.
“It was a credit deal. I’m just not sure where it went,” Durrah said. “I don’t have an intimate knowledge of the deal itself. The only one who does would be Sheriff Wainwright.”
John Reid, the owner of J.T. Reid’s, told a reporter she was bothering his business and to “cease and desist” or he would call his attorney, in response to two phone calls seeking answers. He did not respond to an email asking for an explanation of what he might have purchased on behalf of the sheriff’s office.
Halacy also did not know the specifics of the deal, but at the sheriff’s direction he organized the guns to be sold and witnessed the sales.
Of the 52 guns and gun parts eventually sold, the sheriff’s office had acquired 27 of them from the Dixfield Police Department’s evidence room when that police department closed in 2020 and the sheriff’s office took over its policing duties. Most of the origins of the Dixfield guns were unclear.
Dixfield police did not track many of the weapons they took into evidence, and they even left one lying around the office, according to Halacy’s notes. Most did not have an evidence tag, meaning Halacy could not determine why they were in the department’s possession.
Despite many of the guns’ uncertain origins, Wainwright did not ask Halacy to try to track down owners, notify any owners or the owners’ families that he was selling their guns, or advertise lost property if a gun’s owner wasn’t clear, Halacy said in an interview. While Maine law allows police to sell guns from evidence, it first requires them to make sure no one else has a right to the property.
“I was not directed to try to locate an owner or try to figure out if we could return them. I was not asked to do that,” Halacy said.
If the police do not know who the owner is, they are supposed to advertise abandoned, lost or stolen property in a newspaper. If no one claims it within five months, the property may be thrown out, donated, surrendered to the person who found it or sold to the highest bidder at a public auction, Maine law states.
If the sheriff advertised the guns in a newspaper or sought bids at a public auction, neither the county administrator nor the detective said they knew about it.
Wainwright said he sold no guns that belonged to law-abiding citizens, but he did not answer a question about whether he had advertised the guns with unclear origins to find the owners. Other weapons were used in suicides or suicide attempts, and the families did not want them returned, he said. He did not answer a question about whether anyone had given the sheriff’s office written permission to take possession of them.
On the days the guns were to be sold, Halacy removed them from evidence, and arranged them in a conference room in the criminal investigations division’s building, so the guns could be viewed, he said. He created a list of guns and their associated serial numbers, and he printed off multiple copies for bidders.
“I figured there would be multiple people viewing them to give prices on the lot,” he said.
But only representatives from J.T. Reid’s showed up. The same process happened twice, Halacy said. While he did not remember dates, his paperwork states the sales happened on June 9 and Sept. 7, 2021.
He did not see or hear what deal the sheriff agreed to, but he remembered that at least at one of the sales the sheriff and the gun store owner negotiated a price back and forth. He did not remember any documents being signed.
“A price was agreed upon between the sheriff and J.T. Reid, and I helped them carry the guns out to J.T. Reid’s vehicle,” Halacy said.
Across the United States, police departments have debated what to do with guns they acquire. If police cannot find owners, or owners are legally prohibited from owning guns and no one else is entitled to them, many police departments end up destroying them, though in Maine they are also allowed to auction them.
While some police see a benefit in recouping some money from selling guns, others believe it is antithetical to their missions to put guns back on the street where they could be used in another crime. Indeed, an ongoing federal case in Maine alleges that a woman sold 55 guns, including 15 she bought from J.T. Reid’s last year, to two felons — with prior convictions for assault with a firearm on a police officer — who were outfitting a gang in California. Others simply see it as inappropriate for public agencies to make money off of crime or suicides.
“In most instances we take possession of a firearm following a difficult circumstance or tragic event. After a proper period of time it is appropriate that we destroy that firearm,” said Mark Hathaway, chief of the Bangor Police Department, which has a detailed policy outlining how employees should ascertain the owners of evidence, notify them where their property is and make efforts to return it when warranted.
Maine state government sells some guns that have been seized or forfeited in criminal cases, but they are auctioned off to the highest bidder as part of an event contracted out to a federally licensed firearms dealer. The state does not sell guns that were used to kill people.
Augusta city councilors last year agreed to let their police chief put out a request for proposals for licensed firearms dealers to buy some guns that the Augusta Police Department had acquired over time. But they asked that the chief destroy all guns involved in crimes or used in suicides, according to the Kennebec Journal.
Regardless of what police departments do with guns from evidence, the Oxford County Sheriff’s Office should have made decisions in the open, said county officials and a professor of criminal justice.
Durrah, the county administrator, said he was “disappointed that it went the way that it did.”
While there are various laws dictating how police should dispose of evidence, the county did not have a written policy on how to handle firearms, Durrah said. So after learning about the gun deal, he worked with the county’s attorney to craft one. The guidelines, approved by commissioners May 5, require the county to now obtain verbal or written quotes from at least two licensed weapons dealers when seeking to trade guns.
The new policy also requires the sheriff’s office to maintain documentation of any weapons destroyed or traded, and to provide copies to the county administrator. It directs the sheriff’s office to keep any gun trades separate from any purchases. It also requires the county administrator to sign off on any weapons trades.
There are three main problems with the sheriff’s actions, said Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a former police officer.
“First of all you’re putting guns on the street. That obviously should be a concern to everyone. Secondly, disposing of evidence is generally a tricky thing,” he said, especially if it wasn’t clear if a case was resolved. The sheriff may have disposed of evidence that could one day be needed for a criminal case or that people may one day request back.
“Third is the likely potential for corruption — that they’re selling property improperly, that they’re not accounting for the money,” he said.
As a result, he said, the county should ask for an independent investigation.
The BDN gave Neil McLean Jr., the district attorney for Oxford, Androscoggin and Franklin counties, a spreadsheet with available details of the guns sold from evidence. McLean said he intended to check the status of the criminal cases associated with the guns to see if any remained open or could still be appealed, and whether any guns were legally forfeited. He did not reply before publication.
If a police agency sold guns that lawfully belonged to other people without following the steps laid out in law to find them, the rightful gun owner could sue the agency, but it would unlikely result in the decertification of the officer overseeing the sale, said E. Donald Finnegan, training coordinator at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, which oversees police certifications.
If a gun was recovered recently after being stolen a decade ago, and the original owner had since died and no longer had family — or had moved from the area and couldn’t be reached — “selling the firearm to a federally licensed firearms dealer would be consistent with Maine law,” Finnegan said.
Halacy did not remember the Walther PP 9 mm handgun that Wainwright asked him to add to his pile of guns to be sold in June, but he said he wouldn’t have included it on his own if it had been stolen.
The owner had reported it, and a number of other guns, stolen from his Dixfield property in 2012. The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency then turned it up during a drug search at a home in Peru, Maine, in 2013. Upon learning it had been stolen, the agency returned it to the Dixfield Police Department for safekeeping until it could be given back to the owner, according to police reports.
Dixfield police never gave it to the owner, however, even though its records said it did, because the sheriff’s office discovered it when it took over policing there. Wainwright didn’t give it back either. He said the owner received an insurance settlement from his burglary claim and that the weapon had been the property of the insurance company.
The owner still owns property in Dixfield, but his mailing address is in Boston, according to tax records. He didn’t respond to a BDN letter asking if he wanted to talk about where his gun ended up.
Editor's note: All Things Considered host Robbie Feinberg interviewed Erin Rhoda, the editor of Maine Focus at the Bangor Daily News. You can listen using the above audio player. Rhoda may be reached at erhoda@bangordailynews.com.
This story appears through a media partnership with the Bangor Daily News.