AUBURN — Police used DNA evidence, confidential sources and store surveillance video in tracking down a local father and son in an October home robbery on Park Avenue.

John Michaud Sr. and his son, John Michaud Jr., remained jailed Friday night, nearly two months after they bound up a woman inside her home and robbed her, according to police.

The men, 49 and 19, respectively, are charged with robbery, burglary, criminal threatening and theft in the Oct. 12 heist.

Tina Croteau, the victim of the attack, told police she was on the phone with her mother and just pulling into her garage when she noticed a pair of masked men at the breezeway door.

“Tina stated she was instructed at gunpoint to hang up the phone,” according to a police affidavit. “Tina hung up the phone and dropped it on the floor of her vehicle. Tina stated she was then ordered out of her vehicle at gunpoint and directed to walk into her house through the breezeway. Tina stated she was escorted to her living room where the men used a roll of duct tape that she had in her kitchen and bound her hands behind her back and bound her feet together.”

According to the affidavit, Croteau was placed face down on her living room floor while the men burglarized her home.

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“Tina stated that the older male suspect told her approximately 10 times that she came home at the wrong time. He also stated that she better not try anything stupid or she would be shot. Tina admitted she was in fear for her life and was in fear that it would hurt when they shot her,” according to the affidavit.

Croteau was not shot during the robbery. The men ultimately left her alone, one of them driving off in her Ford Explorer while the other made his getaway on her husband’s Harley-Davidson.

Croteau waited five minutes before getting up and leaving her home through a side door, according to the court document. Once outside, she began yelling for help, rubbing the tape binding her feet on the metal part of a lawn chair to partially cut the tape.

Once partially freed, she walked to the end of the driveway and flagged down a passing motorist, who called 911.

Police swarmed the scene and the search began for the suspects. A short time later, the Harley-Davidson was found in the parking lot of the Family Dollar store in Poland. Police detectives collected DNA swabs from the bike.

Investigators went to local businesses to ask about video surveillance cameras that might have captured images of the suspects as they fled.

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From the Big Apple store at Maine Street and Route 11 in Poland, video showed drivers of both the motorcycle and the Explorer pulling into the store lot and getting fuel from the pumps.

Police said they were able to make out the features of the motorcycle rider in the video, who appeared to be wearing leather garb stolen from Croteau’s home.

Three days later, the Ford Explorer was recovered after it was set on fire on a dirt section of Tobey Road in New Gloucester. That vehicle was sent to the Maine State Police Crime Laboratory for DNA analysis.

On Oct. 19, a week after the attack on Croteau, police issued a bulletin advising that John Michaud Sr. and his son were wanted in the theft of a vehicle in Auburn which was later sold to a man in Avon.

Auburn Detective Nick Gagnon, upon seeing the bulletin, “immediately thought about the incident at the Croteau residence …” according to the affidavit.

A second detective, David Madore, wrote in the document that he was familiar with the senior Michaud from a string of burglaries and thefts in the area. Michaud, Madore wrote, was last known to live in the vicinity of the Family Dollar where the Harley-Davidson had been dumped.

Gagnon and Madore later spoke with a confidential informant who reported seeing both Michauds riding in the stolen Ford Explorer. The informant also told police that the senior Michaud had been trying to sell a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

The search for John Michaud Sr. and his son got underway. On Nov. 5, Michaud Jr. was arrested in Jacksonville, Florida, on Auburn’s arrest warrants and on fresh charges in Florida for carrying a concealed weapon, possessing a firearm with an altered or removed serial number and loitering.

The elder Michaud has since been returned to Maine. He was being held Friday at the Androscoggin County Jail in Auburn on $10,000 bail. His son was in Florida, facing charges there but also awaiting extradition back to Maine.

Michael Koch, center, explains to Auburn Police Officer Thomas Ellis how he found his sister tied up at her home on Park Avenue in Auburn Thursday afternoon after she came home to find two people burglarizing her home. (Sun Journal file photo)


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