NEWRY – News that four people had been brutally slain sent a wave of shock and sadness through Maine’s western mountains Tuesday.

At the Bear River Trading Post on Newry Corner on Route 26 and Route 2, store clerk Barb Gross said everyone entering the store was horrified by the crimes.

“Everyone’s talking about it,” Gross said. “In our sleepy little town, you don’t hear about this often.”

Victims Selby Bullard and Cindy Beatson both worked for Apple Tree Realty in Bethel, Gross said.

Customer Mandy Sysko said her brother was in suspect Christian C. Nielsen’s class at SAD 44’s Telstar High School in Bethel.

“He had bright blond hair and always shaved one side of his head. I don’t remember him being in fights, but he had some pent-up aggression,” she said of Nielsen, whom she knew from back then.

Over at the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce, it was a sullen day that just got worse for Executive Director Robin Zinchuk and employees dealing with shocked visitors.

“It’s a horrible, isolated, shocking tragedy,” she said.

“What an awful thing. It defies explanation. The worst tragedy of the whole thing is these children, Selby’s young girl and son, who lived through the death of their father, who was killed in a car accident in California. She came here after that. How do you endure losing your grandmother and mother in such a grisly crime scene? That’s pretty awful,” she said.

Zinchuk said she knew Nielsen back when he and his parents attended the Congregational Church on Church Street in Bethel. She was his youth group counselor.

“He just appeared to be a normal kid, a cute little blond headed kid turned murderer? Crazy. What could he have possibly been thinking of? Everybody here is just sickened of it. Bethel is the kind of place people come to to get away from that kind of stuff,” Zinchuk said.