Mark LaFlamme

Sometimes, my friends, the good guys win. 

So, two weeks ago, a fellow named Ethan Dumont woke up on a Thursday morning to discover that a four-wheeler had been swiped right off the back of a pickup truck parked at his Lewiston home. 

The thieves were bold. Working in the darkness of the wee hours, they somehow managed to pull the machine off the truck even though it was partially blocked by a trailer with a second four-wheeler parked atop it. 

They got the machine to the ground and rolled it away, and if these were different times, that likely would have been the last Ethan Dumont ever saw of his son’s four-wheeler. 

But as bold as the thieves were, Dumont was twice as determined to get the purloined machine back — and sooner rather than later. 

This wasn’t just any four-wheeler, after all. Dumont bought it for his son, a 15-year-old with special needs, a few years ago during the pandemic. 

Dumont didn’t just want to get the stolen four-wheeler back home; he wanted to do it in such a way that his boy would never even know it was missing in the first place.

“My biggest thing,” Dumont said, “was about finding it before my son even knew about it. He’s a special needs kid and he would have been super upset knowing it had been taken. He would have been obsessed over it.” 

So on that Thursday morning, after discovering the theft, Ethan Dumont got to sleuthing at once. He started with the basics, checking the security camera footage at a neighbor’s home. 

Some clues were revealed, but not enough. Dumont kept working the case. 

“I just went around to the neighbors and started knocking on some doors,” he said.  

The people who live in the neighborhood around Androscoggin Avenue, as it happened, were more than happy to help. Eventually Dumont came to the door of a woman who lived nearby and her cameras had caught some important clues. 

“She got some still shots of the two guys walking through her property,” Dumont said. “So we were able to get a couple of images of them and we were able to get a time stamp.” 

About 2:45 a.m., the thieves had crossed a yard enroute to Dumont’s home. With that important information in hand, Dumont and his neighbor then turned to the video footage, which revealed the same two culprits making off with the four-wheeler. 

“We actually saw footage of them rolling it down the street away from my house towards one of the side streets,” Dumont said.  

He then turned his attention to the route the thieves had taken after stealing the four-wheeler. He knocked on more doors and again, perfect strangers were happy to help. 

The clues just kept coming. 

One neighbor’s camera picked up footage of the thieves rolling the machine across her driveway and now it was clear they had headed toward Lisbon Street with the stolen goods. 

Dumont, inspecting the escape route, was able to find marks where the two men had applied the four-wheeler brakes as they headed away from the Androscoggin Avenue neighborhood. 

From here, Dumont employed some good old-fashioned gumshoe work. He drove to the area of Sand Hill Road, and to the pits behind the old Grimmel’s garage on Lisbon Street, a popular spot for four-wheelers. 

That search didn’t yield any results, though, so Dumont took the next step — the BIG step, as it turns out. 

Dumont turned to the internet for help and though the thieves could have no way of knowing it at the time, their fates were pretty much sealed. 

Dumont posted a simple message on his Facebook page. 

“So last night someone stole Logan’s four-wheeler right out of the back of my truck,” he wrote. “Please, if you can help, Logan would greatly appreciate it…” 

He also shared images of the two thieves captured by that neighbor’s security camera. 

The locals — a whole lot of them — got a whiff of the news and they jumped in with both feet to help. 

It’s not so surprising, really. By and large, the average Joe and Jane can’t stand a thief and when the victim of that theft is a kid, no effort will be spared. 

The search was on for real, now, and it progressed in that way of modern technology that sometimes feels like pure magic. 

Dumont’s post alone was shared by more than 150 people right off the bat. Everybody who clapped eyes on the post, it seemed, passed it on at once. 

But Dumont is a wise and careful investigator and he knows that when it comes to solving a crime, you just can’t have too many eyes on the prize. 

He posted his information to Lewiston Rocks and tapped into the altruistic energy of that group’s legions. Now an entire community was engaged in the search for the missing four-wheeler and the whole matter went into overdrive. 

Dumon’t Lewiston Rocks post was shared hundreds of times more. One local man got in touch and shared the information on one of the biker groups where it was shared even further — if you do the math, it gets dizzying. At times, it felt like every single eyeball on Facebook was zeroed in on the mystery of the stolen four-wheeler while many others went out and physically searched for the machine. 

Dumont got tips. Some of them were spam and schemes, sure, but each of them moved him a little bit closer to boy’s vanished machine. 

That Thursday was a long day of investigative work for Ethan Dumont. Eventually, he had to pack it in for the night, but while he slept, his benevolent army of amateur sleuths stayed on the job. 

“I woke up Friday morning,” Dumont said, “and I had a private message from a woman saying, ‘hey, I think I could possibly identify one of the guys in one of the photos that you shared.'” 

As it happens, this woman had had items stolen by the very same fellow in the not so distant past. She knew his name. She knew enough about him that Dumont could pass the information on to police. 

Enter Lewiston police officers Ryan Gagnon, Joseph Klemanski and Kaden Tozier, who joined the hunt for Logan’s snatched four-wheeler. The officers searched in a couple locations and talked to potential witnesses, generating still more clues.

“They did a really amazing job,” Dumont said. 

In the end, it was a tip to police that put an end to the long and arduous search. According to that tip, the most popular four-wheeler in the world could be found at 102 Pierce St. in downtown Lewiston. 

Police went to that address and, sure enough, there was Logan’s beloved machine. Investigators ultimately charged 27-year-old Scott Call with theft and are looking to charge one other. The case remains under investigation.

Dumont, meanwhile, was able to achieve what might have seemed impossible to some. He recovered the four-wheeler so speedily, his boy never even caught wind of the theft. 

He’s smart enough to know that he couldn’t have done it alone. 

“It was just such an outpouring of support,” he said, of the untold hundreds who jumped in to the fray to help. “It was insane. These people have no clue who I am. I’m not like, this famous person or something. I’m just an average Joe and yet all these people came out to help.” 

The police, too, were stoked to have a happy ending instead of just another stolen item report to keep on file. 

“It made our day,” Gagne said.  

Me, I love these kinds of stories. Not only do the good guys get to score a rare victory, but it’s always a buzz seeing the collective intellect of a motivated community going to work on a problem. It makes me wonder what other common problems our little village could solve if we could maintain this brand of laser-focused unity? 

Logan got his rig back and his dad made a whole lot of new friends during his impressive and admirable efforts to produce a happy ending. 

But for me, the cherry on top is this: chances are real good that the thieves never even got to ride the machine they stole in such a lowly way. They huffed and puffed and wore out their backs and knees pushing that four-wheeler across town and all they got for their pains, really, is legal trouble. 

If only all the thieves among us would come to the same fate.