A father was killed and his son was injured during an exchange of gunfire with police in Belgrade late Friday and early Saturday morning, the Maine Office of the Attorney General confirmed Monday.
The father, Roger Bubar, 65, died from gunshot wounds, according to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. He lived at the mobile home on Oakland Road, where the shooting took place, Tim Feeley, special assistant to the Maine Attorney General said in an email Monday.
His son, Scott Bubar, 40, was wounded by a single gunshot and is recovering in a hospital, Feeley said, but authorities have not identified which hospital. A spokeswoman at MaineGeneral Medical Center said he’s not being treated there, and hospitals in Lewiston and Portland could not confirm if he’s a patient.
A member of the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office, Sgt. Jacob Pierce, was responding to a disturbance call at Roger Bubar’s home when shots were fired early Saturday morning, Feeley said in the email.
During that call, Pierce “is reported to have shot back when fired upon outside the Roger Bubar residence,” Feeley said.
The email from the attorney general’s office did not specify who is believed to have fired the fatal shot or the one that injured Scott Bubar. No additional information will be released by the office until its investigation is complete, Feeley said.
The shooting took place at a mobile home at 1003 Oakland Road, which is also Route 11, near the Oakland town line. The disturbance was first reported around 9:30 p.m. Friday night.
Many officers responded to the scene, including those from the sheriff’s office and Maine State Police, and there were emergency dispatch reports of someone inside the home yelling threats at police and shots fired inside and outside.
Police and local fire departments blocked off the road until early Saturday, Kennebec County Sheriff Ken Mason said that morning, during a brief interview at the scene of the shooting.
The attorney general’s office is now investigating Pierce’s involvement in the Belgrade shooting, as it does with all cases where police officers have used force.
Pierce, of Fairfield, has been placed on paid administrative leave for an undetermined amount of time, said Robert Devlin, administrator of Kennebec County. That’s also standard procedure for officers involved in shootings.
There are no disciplinary records in Pierce’s file, Devlin said.
He’s been a sergeant with the sheriff’s office for about a year and has worked for the county since 2011. He was named deputy of the year in 2016 by then Sheriff Ryan Reardon and received a life-saving award then as well. The latter award indicated, “If the officer/deputy had not acted the person would have lost their life.”
Pierce served an eight-month tour in Afghanistan with the 133rd Engineer Battalion of the Maine Army National Guard 2013-2014. He was a staff sergeant at the time and remains in the guard. Published reports indicate he graduated from the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in May 2012.
There’s also an ongoing, criminal investigation of the shooting, Mason said on Saturday. On Monday, he did not immediately respond to a request for information about Scott Bubar, including his medical condition and whether he’ll face criminal charges.
Feeley declined to provide information about Scott Bubar, saying “this would not be under our purview.”
Neighbors said they thought that Roger Bubar and a younger man had been arguing in the driveway of the mobile home that night.
Josh Worcester lives next door to the home, but his view of the property is blocked by a hill and some trees, he said in an email to the Kennebec Journal. But on Friday night, Worcester was able to hear the argument and also the sounds of a loud car doing burnouts in the driveway.
Worcester thought the younger man was Roger Bubar’s son. He’d overheard them having arguments in the past, but this one sounded more serious.
“At first I didn’t give it much thought, just figured someone was showing off a new muscle car,” Worcester said. “But after 30 minutes of it, we could hear the neighbors arguing in between the burnouts. I could hear who I believed is the neighbor’s son daring his father to call the cops on him. At 9:31, I called 911 to report a domestic dispute because it was getting very rowdy.”
Some time after that, Worcester said he heard a gunshot and again called police. He said the gunfire became more frequent as the night went on and police arrived.
Around 11 p.m., Worcester said he heard a burst of shots, followed by another burst 15 minutes later. He also heard yelling throughout that time. By 11:30 p.m., the gun shots seemed to have ended, he said.
Two other neighbors, Crystal Leavitt and Jordan Greenleaf, live across the street from the mobile home, on a property that’s blocked from the road by a thick row of trees. According to Greenleaf, at least one sheriff’s deputy took cover in those trees on Friday night. As police worked at the scene, he and Leavitt spent about six hours in the safety of their basement, trying to comfort their small terrier.
Greenleaf and Leavitt were not familiar with Roger Bubar or his son, and said Bubar was the only homeowner in their neighborhood that they have not gotten to know.
On Monday morning, there were thick tire marks going through Bubar’s lawn and a dented Ford Mustang was parked to one side of his property. No one was there, and the front of the home was considerably damaged, with broken windows and vinyl siding. At one point, a black cat walked up to the front door and started cleaning itself.
John Short, another neighbor who lives across the street from the mobile home, said he heard gunfire on Friday night after the men, who seemed intoxicated, started arguing.
Before the gunfire, the younger of the two men was operating the red Mustang, Short said. He was spinning the tires and at one point drove it into the mobile home, Short said. The car wedged underneath the home before he backed it out. Throughout that time, the younger man also yelled unintelligibly and walked into the street.
Short did not know the younger man, but thought he was related to Roger Bubar.
“He seemed upset,” Short said. “The guy was being belligerent. He was hollering something.”
Roger Bubar, on the other hand, “didn’t seem too agitated,” Short said. “We’ve had confrontations in the past, but no real issues. I don’t think there would have been an issue if the younger fellow wasn’t there.”
Staff writer Betty Adams contributed reporting to this story.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
