ALBION — A Bath man who announced a bid for the District 52 House seat in April’s special election has been charged with attempted murder and was arrested at gunpoint Monday morning after a car chase, officials said.
The Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department identified 24-year-old Christopher Hallowell as the suspect in the shooting of a 29-year-old female in Shirley at around 6:45 a.m. Monday.
Christopher Hallowell
Maine State Police located Hallowell’s Ford Escape in Albion more than an hour later, which started the chase, according to Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.
Hallowell was pursued by state police for “a few minutes,” McCausland said, before he crashed while attempting to turn at the intersection of Clark and Winslow roads in Albion.
He was taken into custody after the crash, at around 8:15 a.m. Hallowell was not injured, McCausland said, and his car ended up in a field with some damage after having “struck some things along the way.”
“It wasn’t much of a chase,” McCausland told the Morning Sentinel. “The trooper had just turned around to pull him over, and by the time he caught up to (Hallowell), the car had already ended up in the field.”
The Shirley woman was transported to Mayo Regional Hospital in Dover-Foxcroft with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, according to Chief Deputy Todd Lyford of the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Department.
“The victim and the suspect are relatives, but this is not a domestic violence incident,” Lyford wrote in a news release Monday afternoon.
Hallowell is being held in the Piscataquis County Jail on a charge of attempted murder, with an expected court appearance this week. Lyford said the sheriff’s department is working with District Attorney Maryanne Lynch to review the case for any additional charges.
McCausland said the state police’s role in the situation was strictly to apprehend Hallowell after the Piscataquis County Sheriff’s Office sent a warning for troopers in central Maine to be on the lookout for the vehicle he was driving. The agency did not arrest him on any charges of its own, McCausland noted.
Just five months earlier, Hallowell, a Libertarian who formerly sat on the party’s executive committee, campaigned to take the place of Democrat Rep. Jennifer DeChant in Maine’s Legislature. He dropped out of the race by the end of February after failing to collect the 50 signatures required in order for his name to appear on the ballot. The Libertarian Party of Maine lost its official state party status in December. Democrat Sean Palhus ended up winning the April election to replace DeChant, who vacated the seat unexpectedly on Feb. 1 to take a job in the private sector.
At the time, Hallowell told the The Times Record that he was unable to obtain the signatures because he was caring for his great-grandmother in Greenville.
Hallowell has a criminal history that includes a criminal mischief conviction in 2014 that led to two days of incarceration. A Class D assault charge, connected to the same 2014 incident, was dismissed, according to a background check from the Maine State Bureau of Identification.
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