Westbrook police were investigating allegations of child sex abuse against the man who jumped to his death from a Maine Medical Center parking garage last week.
Police Chief Janine Roberts confirmed Monday that Ronald H. Smith, 41, of Westbrook was being investigated. She also confirmed that it was Smith who jumped off the garage in Portland on Thursday morning.
Roberts said her department started its investigation Sept. 13 and had not filed any charges against Smith. She said there was one alleged abuse victim.
At the time of Smith’s death, Portland police would say only that it was a 41-year-old Westbrook man who had jumped from the garage.
Portland police Lt. William Preis said it appeared that the man did not jump from the top floor, which has a tall fence around it. By the time police arrived, the man’s body was lying on Congress Street.
Clay Holtzman, a spokesman for Maine Medical Center, told police that the man was not a patient at the hospital.
Court records show that Smith was arrested in November on charges of criminal threatening with a dangerous weapon, assault and disorderly conduct. He was convicted of assault in May of this year. The other charges were dismissed.
The charges stem from an incident on Nov, 15, 2015, at Smith’s home on Knight Street.
According to statements from Westbrook police officers Brian Grasser and Phil Robinson, Smith threatened his mother-in-law and spit in her face after she went into Smith’s home to drop off her granddaughter and give her grandson a birthday present. Smith took exception to her entering the home without his permission and told her to leave and never come back.
As the woman got into her Jeep, Smith approached it and “spit directly in her face” through an open window, the officers said. She rolled the window up and called 911.
Smith went back into the house and came out with a 5-foot-long wooden stick, which he used to “strike her tires, baseball bat style,” the officers said in their report. Though Smith denied to the officers that he had assaulted his mother-in-law, a neighbor filmed the incident on his cellphone. Smith was arrested.
Records from the Maine State Bureau of Identification show that Smith had a criminal record dating back to December 1993, when he was arrested and found guilty of theft by unauthorized taking.
Smith was later convicted on charges ranging from assault, aggravated assault and aggravated forgery to domestic violence terrorizing and domestic violence assault. He was arrested and convicted twice in 1998, once in 2009, and again in 2015, serving various jail terms and probationary periods.
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