PARIS – An Oxford Hills high school graduate was charged Wednesday afternoon with killing a Raymond man, putting his body in a car and parking it on railroad tracks in Bethel, where it was hit by a train two weeks ago.

Agostino Samson, 23, was arrested by Maine State Police on a murder charge at about 2 p.m. at his grandmother’s home in Windham.

Samson is expected to appear before a judge Thursday morning in Oxford County Superior Court. He is accused of killing his former employer, landscaper Scott Libby of Raymond.

Maine State Police said an autopsy on Libby’s body determined the cause of death was “multiple traumatic injuries of the head and neck.” Their statement did not mention a weapon or a motive for the killing.

The manager of the hostel where Samson was staying said the two men got in a fight there the night Libby was found dead.

State police Detective Lt. Brian McDonough, head of the criminal investigation division out of the Gray barracks, said Libby, 25, was killed elsewhere before the vehicle was placed on the tracks and hit by a train. He declined to say how Libby was killed.

He said Libby and Samson grew up in the area and had known each other for seven years. Samson worked last summer for Libby, who owned greenhouses and a landscaping business, McDonough said.

He said Samson was living at the Bethel Hostel at 646 West Bethel Road at the time of the killing. The hostel is less than a mile from where police found Libby’s compact Chevrolet Cobalt shortly before 3 a.m. Feb. 20. It had been hit from behind by a westbound freight train. Inside the car, rescuers found Libby’s body on the front seat, Bethel police Chief Alan Carr said.

Libby’s injuries made police suspicious about how he died, McDonough said.

An official with St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad said the car “for all intents and purposes” was parked on the tracks about 200 feet west of where the tracks cross Barker Road in West Bethel. The railroad executive said the car was not running and its lights were off. Train crews saw the vehicle and attempted an emergency stop, but still struck the car, moving it 850 feet along the tracks.

Two days after the incident, state police detectives interviewed Samson for about two and a half hours at the Bethel Hostel, manager Wyling Cambrium told the Bethel Citizen.

Cambrium said Samson later told him he worked for Libby.

Libby visited Samson at the hostel to collect a loan and return Samson’s collateral and that transaction was apparently friendly, Cambrium said last week.

“He gave him the money and got back his collateral, which was a watch and a bracelet,” Cambrium said. But then there was a disagreement.

Cambrium described Samson’s version of subsequent events:

“So he said he hit (Libby) a couple of times in the head,” Cambrium said. “At that point, things get vague. According to (Samson) the guy left; he was only here a short time. He doesn’t know whether there was somebody else out in the car or not, but then the guy gets hit by a train.”

Samson was later evicted from the hostel.

Samson is unemployed, according to information from the jail, but Bethel residents said he was recently employed as a cook in the area.

In 2007, Samson was convicted of the sale and use of drug paraphernalia and fined $300, but he has no criminal convictions, according to state records.

A 2004 graduate of Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School, Samson was an honor roll student there.

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