SCARBOROUGH (AP) – A convicted kidnapper who’s trying to find a landlord who’ll accept him after leaving prison said he regrets referring to himself as a “ticking time bomb” in a letter he wrote to a judge.
Norman Dickinson’s description of himself is part of the reason he creates such a furor whenever he tries to settle into a community.
Corrections officials sought Thursday night to assure 100 Pine Point residents that Dickinson doesn’t pose a threat. Dickinson is wearing an ankle bracelet and does not leave his small cabin without a probation officer, Lisa Nash told residents.
Dickinson told the Portland Press Herald that he doesn’t understand how he has become “this public enemy No. 1 that everybody’s making me out to be.”
Dickinson said he was only planning to live in Pine Point for a month, but at the meeting Thursday, Scarborough Police Chief Robbie Moulton said Dickinson’s landlord has decided to move him out because of the community backlash.
Moulton and Nash said officials are looking into a couple of alternative places for Dickinson and that he could be gone within a few days.
It’s an ongoing problem for Dickinson, who was released on probation on Sept. 30. He had to live in a trailer outside the Windham Correctional Center because at the last minute his landlord pulled out of an agreement to take him.
Later, he moved into a Scarborough motel, then the cabin.
Dickinson has had problems adapting to life outside prison. He smashed a TV in a prerelease center in 1997, slipped out of a halfway house for a beer in 1999 and broke the rules in two supervised apartments in 2000 and 2001.
Dickinson said his now infamous “ticking time bomb” reference was used to convince the judge that he could become lash out under unusually stringent rules of release, which at the time required him never to leave home without supervision for five years.
He said he regrets sending the letter, although he stands by the sentiments.
“You lock people up in a hole for a few years, they’re going to get out and take it out on society,” he said.
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