LEWISTON – The grisly find of two sets of human remains in shallow graves about 400 feet off of Foss Road on Saturday morning kept state and city police working into the night.
Lewiston Deputy Police Chief Michael Bussiere said a group of hunters stumbled on the first body about 10:45 a.m. Saturday, just southwest of the Maine Coast railroad tracks on the grounds of EVM Fire Apparatus at the dead end of Foss Road.
They notified police, who closed off the area and began investigating. Police found a second body nearby during a general search of the area.
“It looks like they were in some sort of shallow graves, and there may have been some animals that helped dig that up,” he said.
Bussiere declined to describe the scene, saying the bodies, based on their size, appeared to be adult.
He would not say whether the remains appeared to be male or female or how long they had been at the scene. Police are treating the deaths as suspicious.
Lewiston crime scene investigators and state police had removed both bodies by 9 p.m. Both were being taken to the state Medical Examiner’s office in Augusta for autopsies this morning. Police were counting on the autopsies to put names on the bodies and to give them a cause of death.
“We’re going to be here potentially for a very long time,” Bussiere said Saturday evening. Police had emergency flood lights brought in to light the scene and aid the investigation. A state warden service dog was also being used to search the area.
Investigations at the scene were scheduled to stop for the night about midnight and then continue this morning.
Staff writer Mark LaFlamme contributed to this report.
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