Portland police called to help Bill Lundgren after a brutal roadside assault roughed him up and charged him with OUI instead. photo/courtesy Lundgren
Why can’t police help us the way we help each other?
OK, true-crime fans, please take a few moments to ask yourself how you would respond in the following situations:
1. While driving north on the interstate one rainy summer evening, you notice a vehicle “parked a little sideways” on the shoulder near the Brunswick exit; and when, errand completed, you pass by again a couple hours later, it’s still there. A figure is slumped behind the wheel and the driver’s side window is open, soaking the lone, unconscious occupant, who appears to you to have suffered a debilitating “medical event” of some kind.
2. You turn onto a side street off Forest Avenue in Portland one April night last spring and see a young man who’s just crashed his motorcycle sprawled out beyond the curb. You hurry toward the thrown rider, who’s in a stunned state of shock and must be badly injured. You catch a whiff of something alcoholic — from his clothes or his mouth, it’s hard to tell.
3. It’s the dark evening of New Year’s Day, 2025, and you and your companion are driving in Portland when you spot a Toyota Tacoma stopped on the shoulder. An older man, distressed and bleeding profusely from his face, has just tumbled from the driver’s side door onto the icy asphalt. A tall, noticeably younger man has exited the passenger side and fled, stumbling, into the wooded neighborhood nearby. The silhouettes of two floppy-eared dogs can be seen leaping in distress in the back of the covered pickup truck.
If your answer in all three scenarios is some version of I’d try to help them, you’re in good company. You answered the same way your fellow Mainers did in all three situations; the way we were all raised to respond to an incapacitated stranger in distress; the way evolutionary biologists believe human beings, as a social species, are hardwired to respond to other humans (and most animals) when we encounter one in pain or danger.
Unfortunately, the Good Samaritans in those situations thought the circumstances required more medical help than they could provide at the scene, so they got emergency responders involved — and those emergency responders were police. Unlike ambulance medics and firefighters, or really any bystander capable of compassion, local police respond to these types of calls not to help, first and foremost, but to punish; not to heal, but to hurt, insofar as the law allows and demands. So that’s exactly what they did.
1. The rain-soaked driver, Billy Beaulieu, is shaken awake by the cop the Samaritan found in the Brunswick police station’s parking lot and alerted to the suspected “medical event” out on the interstate. A “long glob of drool” is “hanging from his mouth,” his pupils are “small,” his eyelids “droopy,” his speech “heavily slurred” — all details “consistent with drug use,” the officer surmises, as summarized in a subsequent court decision. Sure enough, Beaulieu tells the cop he’s consumed Suboxone and gabapentin earlier that day. He says he pulled over because he got too tired to drive.
“Based on his observations, the officer asked Beaulieu to undergo several field sobriety tests, all of which Beaulieu failed, in part because he had difficulty staying upright,” reads the decision handed down last month by Maine’s highest court. “After placing Beaulieu under arrest [for Operating Under the Influence], the officer transported Beaulieu to the Police Station. Beaulieu was released on bail.”
That was in August of 2022. Beaulieu pleaded not guilty and fought the charge all the way to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. And lost.
2. The Portland cops responding last spring to a bystander’s call about a motorcycle crash also catch a whiff of alcohol. The injured man (who shared details of the incident on condition of anonymity, given a pending criminal case) owns and operates a brewery in town and had been bartending in its tasting room all day. Other than a glass of beer with lunch about 10 hours prior, he says he hadn’t consumed any alcohol, though some spilled and splashed booze inevitably seeps into his clothing on the job.
He’s had his motorcycle learner’s permit for about six months, and it’s late April, so you don’t have to be Holmes to conclude he’s an inexperienced rider. He’s crashed about 500 feet from his apartment and tells the police he took the turn too fast. The next day, as his memory begins to return, he recalls that he took that turn at high speed to avoid a vehicle running a red light.
That’s no indication the officers had any interest in investigating the crime that allegedly caused the crash. To them, the crash is evidence of its victim’s criminality.
The officers subject the concussed and contused man to field sobriety tests, which he fails, unsurprisingly, in part because among the bones it will later be found that he’s broken (including a clavicle and about half a dozen ribs) is his neck.
Next, they demand he take a breathalyzer test. He refuses and tells them he’d prefer a blood test to determine his blood-alcohol level — the kind administered at a hospital. The officers make him sign something confirming his refusal to blow, then, apparently oblivious or indifferent to his injuries, cuff his arms behind his back and stuff him in the backseat of a cruiser for transport to the Cumberland County Jail. During booking, someone on the jail’s medical staff notices the young man’s terrible condition and directs the cops to bring him to a hospital for emergency treatment, which they finally do. But still, no blood-alcohol test is done.
The brewer’s injuries were likely aggravated by being half hog-tied and manhandled by the cops, and he lawyers up. Not to seek compensation from the city — at least, not yet — but to defend himself against the OUI charge Portland police filed against him that night. Basically broke, he had to get a loan to pay this lawyer (Augusta attorney Walter McKee, who was unavailable for comment before our deadline last month).
The cops could have just walked his $2,000 bike up the street to his apartment building or into the nearest open parking space. Instead, they had it impounded. But that’s been among the least of the brewer’s worries in the nine months since the accident. He hasn’t bothered to even try to get it back.
3. Bill Lundgren, an English professor at Southern Maine Community College, dedicates much of his free time to volunteering at a hospice and delivering for Meals on Wheels. The divorced 70-year-old is also a football fan, so on New Year’s Day he went to a neighborhood bar to have dinner and a couple cocktails while watching a game. Another regular, Thomas Puschock, a 41-year-old construction supervisor, was also at the bar, and the two acquaintances struck up some casual conversation during which Puschock said he didn’t have a ride home.
“I’m leaving in a little bit,” Lundgren offered. “If you can put up with being slobbered over by two Springer Spaniels, I’ll give you a ride.”
As we reported on our Substack (bollardhead.substack.com) on Jan. 10, Puschock gratefully accepted, and sometime before 8 p.m., soon after they crossed Washington Avenue heading north on Allen, Puschock asked Lundgren to pull over. He did so, figuring they were near Puschock’s home, and then without warning or the slightest provocation, according to Lundgren, Puschock began viciously punching him in the face and head, possessed by a blind drunken rage.
“If I wouldn’t have gotten out of my car, I think he would have killed me,” Lundgren, a past freelance contributor to The Bollard, said last month during an interview at his Deering Center home. He opened his driver’s side door and tumbled out as his dogs panicked in back. Puschock exited from his side and fled into the wooded neighborhood nearby. Passengers in a vehicle behind Lundgren’s stopped when they saw him hit the ground and approached to administer aid.
“I can’t even see, I’m bleeding so badly,” Lundgren recalled. He believes the Good Samaritans were off-duty first-responders. “They were awesome,” he said. “They just took control. They got the blood off my face and calmed me down.” They also placed an emergency call to help the stunned and beaten senior, who underwent major back surgery about a year ago.
“When the cops showed up, I’m like, Oh, good. Finally this nightmare is about to end,” Lundgren said. “Instead, it was just fucking starting.”
“From the moment they got out of their car, I was a criminal,” he continued. “The first thing that they should have done with me is taking me to the emergency room. Instead, they were hellbent on filling their DUI quota for the month, and they were convinced that I was drunk.”
The two Portland police officers, both white men, demanded Lundgren perform a field sobriety test. “I said, ‘Guys, I just got the shit kicked out of me. I can barely stand up and you want me to walk a straight line?’”
They did. And after another field test, this one of the assault victim’s eye movements, “they didn’t say I failed, but that’s when they cuffed me,” said Lundgren, “and they cuffed me violently and threw me in the back of the car. It was physical abuse.”
Lundgren was livid and “bewildered,” thinking, “Holy shit, I’m the criminal here suddenly. How the fuck did that happen?”
He’d told the officers he’d been assaulted and even called the bar at the scene to get Puschock’s last name for them. The patrolmen seemed wholly uninterested and unconcerned about the attack, or that a violent man in a drunken rage was then wandering among the houses and businesses nearby in sub-freezing temperature. “‘Oh, there’s three outstanding warrants out for him right now,’” Lundgren said he was told offhandedly. “‘Don’t worry about him. There’s other officers pursuing him.’”
(Reached by phone a full week after the incident, Puschock told The Bollard no police had contacted him about it. He’d been visiting local bars as usual the next day, where staff noticed his face was badly scratched and puffed up — injuries he said he sustained while crawling home through the woods on his stomach the night of the assault. He told The Bollard he has no warrants but is on probation and prohibited from drinking alcohol — he’s been arrested multiple times in recent years, in Lundgren’s neighborhood, on charges including aggravated assault, domestic violence assault and aggravated criminal trespass. He claims to have no memory of attacking Lundgren, only of seeing police lights in the area as he tried to find the wooded path home.)
The handcuffs were extremely tight and had been applied by forcing Lundgren’s arms behind him. Laying on his back, with his hands and shackled wrists beneath his body weight, was too painful, so he sprawled across the backseat on his stomach as the cruiser slowly drove to the Cumberland County Jail six miles away. One of his wrists was still painfully swollen three weeks later.
“I’m in the backseat of the squad car screaming because I was in such agony,” Lundgren recalled. “I might have a low threshold of pain, but it was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life. And they were getting off on it,” he said of the two Portland cops. “They thought it was amusing. They’re just kind of smirking. And when I would say, ‘Can you loosen these [handcuffs] up?’ they would say, ‘No, that’d be a violation of policy. Once they’re on, they’re on.’
“I said, ‘You’re fucking torturing me,’ which is what it was,” Lundgren added. “They didn’t give a shit.”
Upon arriving at the jail, the cops pulled Lundgren out of the cruiser and marched him, still handcuffed, inside, where they attempted to give him a breathalyzer test. Apparently, the machine there wasn’t working properly, so officers drove him to a police station somewhere in South Portland and made him blow into another device.
The result, according to Lundgren, was a blood-alcohol level of .05, about half the legal threshold for an OUI charge (.08), and a level that accords with Lundgren’s story that he’d had two mixed drinks with dinner before leaving the bar an hour or so prior to the test.
The cops were “crestfallen” upon seeing that result, said Lundgren, but they had a theory they believed would justify charging him with drunk driving anyway. “‘If that first breathalyzer would’ve worked, you would have been charged with the DUI,’” they said, according to Lundgren. Whereupon he exploded in indignant anger again.
“‘And that’s my fault that you can’t get technicians to get equipment that works, you fucking morons?’” he screamed at them.
Finally, Lundgren was transported in the cop car to the emergency department at Maine Medical Center in Portland’s West End, admitted as an “incarcerated suspect.” A young ER doctor eventually stitched up the gashed brow above his right eye and bandaged his badly bruised right ear and skull. Lundgren’s wrists, ribs and back were also in significant pain, he was having difficulty taking deep breaths, and he was experiencing what his doctor later called “brain fog” caused by a severe concussion, the effects of which also continued for weeks.
As did the nightmare.
The Portland Police Department had called Maietta Towing to remove Lundgren’s pickup from the scene, but when Lundgren called to retrieve it the following morning, neither the cops nor the South Portland wrecker company could find it. After numerous phone calls and about two hours, the truck was finally located in a tow lot; Lundgren had to pay $150 to get it back.
His traumatized dogs had been brought to the Animal Refuge League in Westbrook, where he had to pay another $125 to regain custody of them following a prolonged application process and a mini-investigation shelter staff undertook to confirm he’s their rightful owner.
On Jan. 3, Lundgren went to police headquarters on Middle Street to file a complaint against the two officers. (One of them is Cody Curtsinger, who joined the force in 2022, according to a Portland Police Department Facebook post. The identity of the other officer is being withheld from the public by the police department.) He was told at the station that a copy of the officers’ incident report would be available for him in five days, and a senior officer there sat him down to chat.
The erudite English professor refers to this smooth-talking supervisor as Mr. Oleaginous (the department also refused to identify him). Defending the patrolmen, this officer said, “‘Well, you know, you were contentious with them,’” according to Lundgren, who replied, “‘I was not contentious with them until they were fucking with me. They started it.’”
The supervising officer also repeated the patrolmen’s contention that Lundgren had been too drunk to drive that night, saying, “‘You probably were over the limit when they first encountered you,’” Lundgren recalled.
“‘That’s fucking speculation,’” Lundgren shot back. “‘You have no idea. … If you can’t get your breathalyzer to work, that’s on you. I should have been taken to the hospital immediately, and they could have done a simple blood test right there to determine my blood-alcohol content.”
On Jan. 7, The Bollard e-mailed Portland Police Department spokesman Brad Nadeau with questions about the cops’ response to Lundgren’s assault as well as the call to help the injured motorcyclist last spring. “We are not going to comment on these active/open cases,” Nadeau wrote back.
When The Bollard followed up the next day to confirm that all the information we’d sought was secret — including policy questions and whether the department has any OUI-enforcement grants, incentive programs or functional breathalyzers — Nadeau provided a link to the department’s Standard Operating Procedures.
He also broke this news: “Mr. Lundgren was charged on 1/1/25, the day of his arrest. In this case, we are not able to release the names of anyone involved with the active investigation.”
That same day, Jan. 8, Lundgren, who’d been unaware he was charged with OUI, followed up with the department regarding the incident report they’d promised to provide. This time, police said he’d have to ask a judge to order them to share that report during the discovery period of his forthcoming prosecution. His first court date is scheduled for this month, and he’ll have to borrow money against his house to pay a criminal-defense lawyer.
In the Standard Operating Procedures manual, the section on “alcohol enforcement countermeasures” reads: “The Portland Police Department recognizes that operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs is a serious problem that threatens the safety of the public. In an effort to combat this problem, the Department urges all officers to be alert for the signs of alcohol and/or drug impairment in all contacts with motorists, and make every effort to apprehend violators.”
But in Section Two, under “Professional Conduct and Responsibility,” it says that while on duty, officers shall “at all times take appropriate action to protect life and property; aid the injured; preserve the peace; prevent crime; detect and arrest violators of the law; and enforce Federal,
State and local laws and ordinances according to Department policy.”
The directives to “aid the injured” while also making “every effort to apprehend [OUI] violators” appear to be at odds in emergency situations, with the mandate to make drunk-driving arrests taking priority over the immediate medical needs of assault and accident victims.
“I don’t really like cops, but I’ve always kind of trusted them to do the right thing,” said Lundgren. “I have had really good experiences with them, too, like when my weed got stolen.”
Lundgren called Portland police a few years ago when someone stole marijuana he’d been legally growing in his backyard garden. “That cop was so awesome, and helpful, and just courteous,” he said. The cops who responded when he was attacked “were the absolute antithesis of that. … They were so egregiously invested in fucking me up, and it just really destroyed any confidence I will ever have in the police ever again.”
Lundgren has contributed numerous book reviews to The Bollard over the years, as well as a couple cover stories, including “Up Long Creek Without a Paddle” [Sept. 2019], about his work on a 2006 project to help kids incarcerated in Maine’s youth prison tell their stories. He sees the world through bookish eyes.
“It’s like I ended up in the middle of a Kafka novel, The Trial,” the professor said of his ordeal. “For 500 pages, he’s on trial, and they never tell him what for. They never tell him what he’s being charged with. This is very similar. God damn.”
All because a Good Samaritan tried to get help.
•••
The case of Billy Beaulieu, the man passed out beside the interstate three years ago, made news last month because the Maine Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling involved our state’s so-called Good Samaritan law. Passed in 2019 amid cresting overdose deaths, the law protects people rending aid at the scene of a drug overdose, as well as the individual overdosing, from prosecution on drug charges and most other non-violent crimes. Its intent is to convince people to call 911 without fear responding officers will use the occasion of the medical emergency to make a bust.
A quirk of this law is its requirement that the emergency call specifically refer to an actual or suspected drug overdose in order for anyone at the scene to be granted immunity. The woman who saw Beaulieu’s vehicle told the officer she thought he’d experienced a “medical event” — about as close a diagnosis as one can make at a glance while traveling at interstate speed. The high court determined that wasn’t specific enough to satisfy the Good Samaritan rule, despite strong evidence and officer testimony that Beaulieu had indeed taken too many drugs to function, prompting the emergency response.
Furthermore, last year, the Maine Legislature removed OUI from the list of crimes granted immunity under “Good Sam,” as the law’s called around the State House. In a letter sent to legislators in September of 2023 by Shira Burns, Executive Director of the Maine Prosecutors Association, Burns cites two reasons why people suspected of overdosing, and anyone trying to help them, should be at risk of prosecution if a responding officer suspects someone was driving while impaired.
The first reason is newsworthy in itself, as Burns alleges that police in Maine almost never observe someone driving erratically and pull them over for OUI. “Almost all OUIs, if not all, are called in by a civilian in another vehicle,” Burns told lawmakers. “These 911 calls are being made regardless of the Good Samaritan law.”
The second reason cites the aforementioned quirk regarding the wording of emergency calls. “In 2019, crashes involving impaired driving resulted in 138 serious injuries in Maine,” Burns wrote. “An [unintended] consequence of [Good Sam] is also applying immunity to drivers impaired by alcohol just because the 911 call mentioned an overdose.”
Burns cited only one example of this, from 2023, when a woman passed out behind the wheel in Lebanon about 15 minutes after using “heroin/fentanyl,” but Good Sam immunity applied “and she was not prosecuted so her license was never suspended.” In the other example the prosecutor provided to lawmakers, an “erratic” driver later determined to have used drugs was charged and prosecuted for OUI, because the emergency call concerned their driving, not their drug use.
The push to allow OUI charges at overdose emergency scenes took the Good Sam law’s supporters by surprise. Writing to lawmakers a year ago on behalf of the Maine Association of Defense Lawyers, McKee — who’d be hired as the banged-up brewer’s attorney a few months later — noted that OUI was never raised as an issue during the voluminous debate over Good Sam five years prior. “And yet now here we are, years later, with a chiseling away of a law that has ensured that people who report [overdose] emergencies do not second guess themselves because they may be charged with OUI,” he wrote.
“This bill … would go in the opposite direction from trying to keep people from dying,” McKee continued. “Instead, it would put back in place the precise problem when it comes to someone calling to get help for someone who was overdosing.” Voting for the prosecutors’ proposed change to Good Sam “would be a vote that prosecution of OUI was more important than the life of someone who was overdosing,” he asserted.
The Legislature passed it anyway and Gov. Janet Mills, a career prosecutor before winning the Blaine House, signed it into law.
When Maine’s Supreme Court denied Beaulieu’s claim to protection under Good Sam last month, his lawyer, Max Coolidge, said in court, “We want a society where people trust 911 or go into the police [station] to be able to get assistance for another person without fear for themselves, or the person they’re concerned about, being arrested and potentially charged with a crime,” according to the Portland Press Herald.
Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris did not respond to questions about these two Portland cases or about her office’s general considerations when prosecuting assault and accident victims for OUI. Court filings containing the facts and arguments in the brewer’s case are not available at the courthouse or on its public online database, and Sartoris also did not respond to our request for that information. We do know the arresting officer of record that spring night was Matthew Payoczkowski, who joined the force in 2019. The brewer also has a court appearance scheduled for this month.
The brewer and Lundgren are at a loss to explain how a call to save their life turned into a prosecution to ruin it. They speculate that perhaps a push to meet OUI arrest quotas or increase revenue from court fines and fees may be factors, but strong clues can be found in the circumstances of their arrests.
If, as Burns asserted, emergency calls from civilian drivers lead to nearly all the OUI stops in Maine, then motorists disabled by accidents, assaults or medical emergencies are the prime targets of drunk-driving enforcement, because they’re by far the easiest to catch and to prosecute. Not only are their vehicles not going anywhere, but the drivers tend to be in a state of shock or panic, suffering from concussions or other bodily injuries that greatly impair their ability to make rational decisions or perform tests of balance and coordination.
Neither the brewer nor Lundgren could remember much at all about their interactions with police at the scene (most of the brewer’s recollections are from police body-cam or cruiser footage provided to his legal defense months afterward). Yet the statements and actions of injured or incapacitated drivers at emergency scenes form the crux of the OUI cases against them.
Furthermore, as these two Portland cases demonstrate, proof of a blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) above .07 is not required for arrest and prosecution, but many thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours are required to defend against it. In fact, local police are actively promoting the patent falsehood that driving with a BAC below the legal limit is “drunk driving.”
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s so-called “social norming” ad campaign, “Buzzed Driving Is Drunk Driving,” has recently been adopted and spread by, among many others, the Maine Department of Transportation, which flashes it on roadside caution signs for people to read while driving the interstates, and the Portland Police Department, which posted one of its memes on social media last July Fourth.
On its website, the NHTSA warns: “Even a small amount of alcohol can affect driving ability. In 2022, there were 2,337 people killed in alcohol-related crashes where a driver had a BAC of .01 to .07.”
So Mainers and the millions of visitors to our famous restaurants and breweries are now on notice: If you drive after consuming even a drink or two and subsequently need help from emergency responders due to an accident, assault, rape, robbery or medical problem, you are at risk of arrest for OUI regardless of your blood-alcohol level. And if, while driving buzzed or shortly afterward, you witness someone in dire distress and stop to help, you risk arrest if police respond to the emergency call and find you there — even if you’re in the act of saving a life by, say, administering naloxone to reverse an overdose.
In Lundgren’s story, it’s notable that the only people who treated him with compassion (or competency) during his ordeal were the only people with nothing to gain by helping him: the Good Samaritans who wiped the blood from his eyes.
Even Puschock, who’d left his wallet in Lundgren’s truck, behaved decently the next day. When Lundgren called and asked why he’d attacked him, he said Puschock “got immediately so contrite” and acknowledged he’d done it, though he claimed to have blacked out.
When Puschock arrived at Lundgren’s house to retrieve his wallet, he handed Lundgren a sandwich he’d made at home as a kind of peace offering. Lundgren said he appreciated the gesture, but it was a lousy sandwich, just “a piece of bread and a piece of meat.” The bread went into the garbage, he recalled, “but I might’ve given the meat to the dogs.”
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