LEWISTON — A local man was shot Saturday on Bartlett Street and police were searching for the shooter on Monday.

Police said Malik Hollis, 29, was shot sometime around 5:30 p.m. Saturday in the area of Bartlett and Walnut streets. Police said when they responded to reports of gunfire in the area, officers found him “hiding in an apartment, suffering from two gunshot wounds.”

Witnesses reported seeing the shooting victim climbing a fence as he scrambled from the shooting scene.

Investigators believe Hollis was shot on the street but that he fled into an apartment house before police arrived. Police later found spent shell casings in an alley behind a Bartlett Street apartment building.

Hollis was taken to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston and was expected to survive his wounds.

In 2018, Hollis was part of a controversial Maine Supreme Judicial Court decision that upheld his felony convictions stemming from an incident in downtown Lewiston two years earlier.

According to court records, Hollis was arrested May 21, 2016, after clashing with several white men outside an apartment building on College Street in Lewiston.

Hollis testified that he was confronted by three men, each carrying a weapon of some sort, and that he “decided to retrieve his handgun after the men swore at him, chased him and threatened to kill him.”

During the trial, one of those men confirmed Hollis’ account and acknowledged that he hit Hollis with a metal handlebar, called Hollis the “n” word and threatened to kill him.

According to court records, that man “also testified that one of the other men on his side had an aluminum baseball bat and another had a baton.”

None of the three was charged with any crime.

After Hollis was threatened, he “ran around the corner to his apartment and returned with a handgun, according to court records. Upon returning outside and seeing the men,” Hollis fired his gun in their direction into a dirt pile on the ground, according to court records.

He was later arrested outside his apartment, where he was found hiding under a deflated air mattress that was lying in a third-floor hallway. The gun was found under a raised floorboard in the same building.

When Hollis went to trial in 2017, he testified that he had not intended to hit anybody, only to scare them, arguing self-defense.

The jury found him guilty of reckless conduct and criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon, and he was later sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to forfeit his gun.

Hollis, who is Black, filed a motion for a new trial, arguing that striking the sole person of color from the jury “violated the principles of equal protection and due process.”

Maine’s highest court ruled in July of 2018 that an Androscoggin County prosecutor did not discriminate against Hollis when she rejected the only person of color from a jury that later found the man guilty of two felonies.

At the time, Hollis’ attorney, James Howaniec, reacted strongly to the court decision.

“The Maine Supreme Court has basically said that prosecutors can exclude the lone Black juror in a room filled with 100 white jurors in a case involving an African-American defendant, for the most tenuous of reasons,” Howaniec said at the time.

Howaniec unsuccessfully appealed the decision.

Police were continuing to investigate the Saturday afternoon shooting on Bartlett Street. No arrests have been made.