A Hancock County man who has been on the run for the past five years after getting into a scuffle with and running away from a state trooper has been caught in Hawaii and brought back to Maine.
Joey Ronald Ouellette, 38, of Sedgwick, was last seen by police in Steuben in September 2013, when he was pulled over for allegedly driving a motorcycle at 127 mph on Route 1. He allegedly got into a scuffle with Maine State Police Sgt. Alden Bustard, grabbed Bustard’s Cap-Stun pepper spray, and sprayed him with it before running off into the woods.
Ouellette got away, eluding police despite a subsequent search of the area by several officers and a police search dog. But last week, after state police got a tip about where he was, Hancock County District Attorney Matthew Foster approved a nationwide extradition warrant and local police in Hawaii took him into custody.
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Ouellette was booked in Hancock County Jail in Ellsworth on Friday on multiple charges stemming from the roadside incident in Steuben, including criminal use of disabling chemicals for allegedly using the pepper spray on Bustard. Ouellette was on probation for a 2010 conviction for unlawful trafficking in oxycodone, and so also is being held on a probation revocation.
“We never stopped looking for him,” Lt. Rod Charette of the Maine State Police said Thursday. Charette oversees the department’s Troop J division in Hancock and Washington counties.
Charette said that Ouellette had been “bouncing around” while police were looking for him, including in Maine and in New Hampshire, but was in Hawaii when police got a tip he was there.
Bustard was one of the troopers who traveled to Hawaii to pick up Ouellette and bring him back to Maine, Charette said. He said Ouellette has not provided police with much information about what he has been up to for the past five years.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation” on the flight back to Maine, Charette said. “There is a general assumption that he was [in Hawaii] eluding capture.”
Charette said there is a certain amount of satisfaction in capturing Ouellette, but said none of it is personal.
“There are a lot of things that went right” in finding and taking Ouellette into custody, he said, adding that Foster deserves credit for approving the extradition warrant. “It’s a good example of how we’re going to bring people to justice.”
Ouellette’s sentence on his 2010 drug trafficking conviction was for three years in prison, but it was fully suspended and he was placed on two years probation, according to court records. He already had his probation partially revoked in 2011 for failing to report an accident by the quickest means, driving to endanger and domestic violence threatening, and so was still on probation when he ran from police after being pulled over for speeding in Steuben.
A probation revocation hearing for Ouellette has been scheduled for Nov. 7.
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