LEWISTON – Police are investigating why a Lewiston teenager shot into two occupied buildings at Elm and Main streets before fleeing to his father’s apartment several blocks away Tuesday morning.
Aron Pepin, 19, was arrested at 2 Granite St., where he lives with his father, police said. He is charged with two counts of reckless conduct after firing two rounds in an apartment building at 25 Elm St. about 10:30 p.m. Monday, then shooting at the New Beginnings building at 436 Main St. Police said one of the shots missed a person by five feet or less.
No one was hurt.
Moments after the shootings were reported, police were given information that Pepin had run into a nearby house on Main Street where a relative lives with her children. For six hours police surrounded the building.
Beginning about midnight, police Crisis Management Specialist Lauri-Cyr Martel used a bullhorn to try to make contact with Pepin from outside the house.
“We need you to come to the back door now so we can speak to you,” Martel hollered toward the house at Main and Arch streets. “We need to make sure the children are OK.”
For several hours, similar attempts were made to reach Pepin or others believed to be inside the two-apartment house. There was no response.
At one point, a neighbor annoyed by the noise and commotion produced his own bullhorn and began shouting from his home farther down Main Street. A police officer went to speak to him.
Late into the drama, a teenage girl ran along a sidewalk toward the house at Arch and Main streets. She was quickly grabbed by an officer and moved away from the area.
The teenager later said she had initially believed it was one of her friends holed up inside the house.
While more than a dozen Lewiston police officers surrounded the Main Street house, others were sent to different parts of the city in case Pepin had gone to another location.
“We basically had two shifts working,” said Lewiston Deputy Chief Michael Bussiere.
At 2 a.m., police began blocking a long stretch of Main Street, from Elm Street to an area beyond Riverside Street. About the same time, officers from the Maine State Police Tactical Team began arriving.
At 2:30 a.m., as state police were still arriving, a pedestrian began weaving down Main Street toward the scene of the standoff. Witnesses said the man taunted police officers and challenged them to fight.
Lewiston police officers arrested Nathan Boucher, 19, of 119 Oxford St. during a scuffle in front of Central Maine Medical Center and charged him with disorderly conduct, refusal to submit to arrest and violating conditions of release.
With snipers stationed around the Main Street house, state police tried again to contact occupants of the house. At 4:15 a.m. they used a concussion grenade to distract anyone inside, and tactical team members burst in but found no one.
Minutes later, Lewiston police radioed that they had Pepin in custody at his father’s residence at 2 Granite St., near the dead-end section of Bates Street.
Police said they did not find the gun used in the shootings but did recover spent shell casings at Elm and Main streets for examination.
Pepin was being held Tuesday night at the Androscoggin County Jail on $10,000 cash bail. He was also being held for Biddeford police, although it was not clear why.
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