The teenager charged with the death of paddleboarder Sunshine Stewart last July spent time at a psychiatric facility and had at least one previous interaction with law enforcement. The details about 18-year-old Deven Young were made public this week following a lawsuit by the Midcoast Villager.
Ordered to be unsealed by a judge, the records show Young has had behavioral issues including ADHD and defiance disorder. They also describe multiple physical altercations with unnamed individuals, which have resulted in Young bloodying a woman's face, and in him getting hit in the eye.
In January 2023, a Waldo County sheriff's officer visited his school and his home in Frankfort to discuss an altercation he'd had.
In the officer's heavily redacted narrative, those interviewed reported that Young has "bad spells" when he doesn't take his medication and that he destroys things when he doesn't get his way. One person described how every room in his house had holes in the walls.
Young was arrested two weeks after Sunshine Stewart's body was found on Crawford Pond in Union where he and his family had been vacationing. The Maine medical examiner's office ruled Stewart's cause of death was strangulation and blunt force trauma.
Young, who was 17 years old at the time, was charged as a juvenile.
