LEWISTON — Kevin Scribner, 27, of Harrison, who is facing a felony charge of leaving the scene of an accident that resulted in the death of 21-year-old Brittany Stanhope of Paris in September, made his first appearance in court Wednesday.

He deferred entering a plea until his case goes before an Androscoggin County grand jury, and prosecutors agreed to his request to reduce bail from $5,000 cash to $2,500.

The grand jury is scheduled to meet in December.

Standing before Judge Rick Lawrence in the Lewiston Unified Court on Wednesday, Scribner relied on his attorney, Edward Dilworth, to answer questions from the judge.

Stanhope was killed after being struck by a vehicle on Route 117 in Turner on Sept. 19. She had pulled her car onto the shoulder of the road after noticing some mechanical problem, according to police. She was standing on the road, after having opened the rear passenger door to get her purse, when she was hit. She was thrown a distance from her car and died at the scene.

The driver who struck her did not stop at the scene, according to police.

Since the accident, friends and family have placed a memorial cross and other mementos at the scene, including flowers and scarves, highlighting the memorial with solar-powered outdoor lights that glow with a purple hue at night.

According to a police affidavit, Scribner was visiting a friend in Turner and told his parents when he arrived home at 9:35 p.m. — about 45 minutes after the crash — that he had been blinded by oncoming headlights during the trip home and thought he hit a deer.

Scribner and his parents went outside to look at the damage to his truck but didn’t see any deer hair. Scribner’s father, Thomas Scribner, asked whether he might have hit a “sign or something” and “Kevin told Thomas, ‘I don’t know what I hit,’” according to police.

“The family watched the news at 11 p.m. and did not see anything so they went to bed,” according to Androscoggin County Detective Maurice Drouin’s affidavit. After not finding deer hair on the truck, the family watched the news specifically “in case it wasn’t a deer.”

Scribner initially told police that after reading media reports of the fatal accident the following morning, he decided to contact them and report that he drove past Stanhope’s car but thought he hit a deer, police said.

But, according to an affidavit filed in support of the arrest warrant, Drouin wrote that Scribner’s parents, after seeing media reports about the fatal accident, told Scribner to call police “because it was the right thing to do.”

When police interviewed Kevin Scribner later that day, he told police he estimated the damage to his truck at about $4,000 and that he’d spent the morning “looking at eBay . . . for vehicle parts to replace the broken ones on his truck.”

In his affidavit, Drouin noted that he thought the parts shopping was “odd because Kevin’s vehicle had full coverage and the damage would be covered under his insurance policy.”

Later during the interview, Scribner admitted to police that he was texting on his cellphone prior to the crash, according to the affidavit. He had received a text from his friend “thanking him for a great night . . . and for him to drive safe” at the same time that Scribner was driving on Route 117 “in the area of the small bridge just before the crash.”

He responded to that text, and then sent a text to someone else about a dirt bike he was considering buying, the affidavit said.

Scribner also told police that after crossing the bridge and just before the crash, he saw what he thought was a lifted trunk on a car that was “kind of in his lane, which blinded him.”

When police asked to see the texts, Scribner told them he had erased his messages that morning because he was having problems with his phone.

Scribner was arrested Sept. 30 after the Maine State Police Crime Lab matched Stanhope’s DNA profile to blood found along the side of Scribner’s black 2012 F-250 Ford pickup truck. He was taken to the Androscoggin County Jail, where he remained for two nights before posting bail.

Scribner has no prior criminal history, according to the State Bureau of Identification. 

He holds a Class A commercial truck driver’s license, certified as an interstate driver, and has several minor driving convictions on his license. 

If convicted, Scribner faces up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $5,000.

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