LEWISTON – Paul Benson, an Auburn doctor who spent nearly two decades treating local families, has died.

His former practice, the Gray Family Health Center, was closed Thursday as word spread that Benson had apparently taken his life.

“Nobody was able to think straight,” said Dr. Frederick Van Mourik, Benson’s former partner. The office is scheduled to reopen today. “You’re not doing the patients any service when you’re distracted.”

For more than eight years, from August 1999 until October 2007, the two had shared the family practice. Benson, 43, was popular with patients and staff.

“We connected very well on how to approach medicine, as an art as well as a science,” Van Mourik said. “He’d do anything for his patients.”

Benson grew up in Massachusetts. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and the University of Massachusetts medical school in Worcester before arriving in Maine in the late 1990s, completing his residency at Central Maine Medical Center.

In 2000, Benson earned his certification by the American Board of Family Practice.

“He was very pleasant and professional,” CMMC spokesman Chuck Gill said Thursday. “Everyone here is shocked and saddened.”

Benson’s body was found at about 9:15 p.m. Wednesday. He was discovered in a parked sedan on Thayer Road, a dead-end dirt road near Paris Hill, Paris police Chief David Verrier said.

Benson had been a doting dad to his two sons, Van Mourik said. The doctor had often left the office in a rush to attend an athletic event, sometimes coaching with his boys.

The Sun Journal was unable to speak with Benson’s family Thursday.