RUMFORD – Police responded Monday afternoon to a young woman’s cell-phone call for help from a store and later arrested a Milton Township man, charging him with persistently following and threatening her, Detective Paul Casey said Tuesday.

Jerome J. Farrar, 28, who lives on Concord Pond Road in the township southeast of Rumford, was charged with misdemeanor crimes of stalking and criminal threatening, and later released on $2,000 unsecured bail. He was warned to stay away from the 18-year-old girl and will be arraigned July 3 in Rumford District Court.

Casey said that when the woman called at 1 p.m., reporting she was being followed by a man she didn’t know, he and two Rumford officers quickly responded.

It wasn’t the first time she’d called for help. She filed a complaint against Farrar April 5, saying he was stalking her in another store and “made several sexually inappropriate comments to her, causing her to become afraid,” Casey said. Police didn’t find the man then, but spotted him in the store with the woman on Monday because she stayed on the phone to police.

Based on her description of the man, the officers followed Farrar when he left the store and drove off in his car, Casey said. They stopped the car on Essex Avenue, where he was questioned about the incident, then arrested and booked at the police station holding facility, he said.

The woman, whose town Casey wouldn’t reveal, told him Farrar had followed her on more than three occasions in Rumford over the past month and a half.