Former state Rep. Jeff Evangelos, an independent from Friendship who advocated for criminal justice reforms, has died.

Evangelos passed away this month after having metastatic prostate cancer for almost eight years, his wife, Harolyn York, confirmed Thursday to the Press Herald. He was 73.

“Jeff was the best husband, father and Grampy in every way,” York wrote in an email Thursday afternoon. “Nobody could ever ask for a better husband.”

To his colleagues in the Legislature, Evangelos was an unabashed advocate for his beliefs who was willing to criticize both Gov. Janet Mills and former Gov. Paul LePage.

He fought for criminal justice reforms while in Augusta, where he was a state lawmaker from 2012 to 2016 and again from 2018 to 2022. One of his signature efforts was a proposal to study restoring parole after Maine became the first state to abolish it in 1976.

Evangelos criticized Mills, a former prosecutor and attorney general, for the Democrat’s move to hold up the legislation in 2021 after it passed both chambers.

Evangelos said over the years that Maine’s criminal justice system defers too much to prosecutors and police and does too little to help those in prison. Though the Maine Department of Corrections launched a restorative justice-focused initiative in 2022, advocates have continued to call for the reestablishment of parole, including via a bill this year from Rep. Nina Milliken, D-Blue Hill. That measure faces hurdles after the Judiciary Committee largely opposed it Wednesday.

“We fund the police, we fund the prosecutors, we fund the courts and we fund the prisons without reservation,” Evangelos said in 2021 when sharing his plan to not seek reelection. “But when it comes to funding an innocence plea or effective legal defense counsel for poor people, Maine’s running a rummage sale.”

Milliken said on the House floor Thursday that she visits the Maine State Prison about once a week and that Evangelos’ name was always in the visitor log right before or after hers.

“His loss is an enormous loss for a lot of men who should not be in prison. Jeff Evangelos was a champion for some of the people who are the hardest people to publicly and politically support,” Milliken said. “He’s Mother Theresa.”

Evangelos also clashed with LePage, the Republican governor from 2011 to 2019, who is running this year for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District seat. Evangelos cosponsored a LePage impeachment effort that failed to pass the House in 2016, and then sought later that same year to invoke a constitutional clause to remove the combative governor. Evangelos cited how LePage left Rep. Drew Gattine, D-Westbrook, a profane voicemail before LePage also told reporters he wished to duel Gattine, saying he would point a firearm “right between his eyes.”

During his final year in the House in 2022, Evangelos was living with prostate cancer and leukemia, and he was hospitalized due to COVID-19. But he reportedly stayed busy while in the intensive care unit of a Damariscotta hospital, keeping a briefcase and laptop with him while also taking calls from constituents.

Evangelos was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and went to the University of Maine for graduate school before jumping into public service. He moved from Orono to work for towns in Washington County before heading to Knox County and becoming the town manager of Warren in his early 20s.

He would go on to serve 15 years as business manager for what is now Regional School Unit 40, which covers Friendship, Warren, Union and other Midcoast towns.

Evangelos, who shared four children and four grandchildren with York, said in a 2007 interview that he moved to Friendship around 1995 and was “semi-retired” after owning a business. But he stayed active volunteering in the community, growing his own food as much as possible and “making a living off my farm a little bit.”

Then the Legislature came calling. The independent first won election to the Maine House of Representatives in 2012 and was reelected in 2014. (He said in the 2007 interview conducted by two Friendship students that he had left the Democratic Party because “they haven’t taken [former President George W.] Bush and impeached him for lying us into that war in Iraq.”)

Evangelos did not seek reelection in 2016, but won his seat again in 2018 before serving one last term from 2020 to 2022.

York said Thursday her husband was a patient at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and “utilized several clinical trials, hoping to help others farther down the road.”

“We shared 30 years together on our little farm where Jeff had an amazing garden, admired by many, and cut, split and chopped his own wood for the winter,” York said. “He will be profoundly missed.”

Staff writer Rachel Estabrook contributed reporting.