Maine Newspaper & Police Department Leaders Assist Abusive Police Officer in Dehumanization of Disabled Veterans During a Mental Health Crisis (2024)

Sun Journal Destroys the Future & Family of a Poor Rural Maine Kid with No Support or Criminal History Who Served Honorably in the Air Force, Obtained a Master’s Degree in Public Policy & Management, & Volunteers

“For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

Lee and Jennifer at the San Clemente Pier, California (2023)

I’m speaking out as me for the first time ever because I am finally in treatment for the complex post traumatic stress and chronic lead poisoning I really wish I didn’t have. Both rendered me mute and unable to function after we fell into a death spiral because nobody gives a f*ck about us in the State of Maine. As a result, we are dependent on the system to help us with any and all mental health crisis but just ask Robert Card’s family… that’s not how it works in Maine. I landed in this small town because I inherited a home from my father and both Lee and I thought it would be a great place for us to relax, unwind, and decompress after serving fifteen plus years in the Air Force. I made the mistake of volunteering on a Finance Committee and Lee made the mistake of wanting shared custody of his two boys… both came with people with financial motives. The Town and local Police Department don’t want you f*cking with their budget and high conflict baby mama will falsely accuse you of domestic violence to keep them child support checks coming.

After going down with multiple undiagnosed health issues in 2021, we both landed in emergency rooms. Our deteriorating health forced us to look for someone who would listen to us and help us because we had no more “rugged individualism” left due to a lack of healthcare in Maine. In a stroke of good luck, the pandemic drove the home prices up in rural Maine so we sold our house furnished to save our lives. We packed up our small U-haul, moved to California to a place that’s considered one of the most chill places in the world to live, and we found ourselves a rare disorder doctor. We didn’t know what to expect but we didn’t care, we were both dying and without medical intervention, it was over for us. We nailed the doctor on the first try and woke up a year later to living in a beautiful paradise with diversity and harmony. We were only planning on staying here for a year. But as it turns out we love where we live and besides we have a few more years of treatment because critical health issues were ignored and created chronic illnesses for both of us.

We feel like we woke up from a nightmare that not even Stephen King could imagine. What the Sun Journal newspaper didn’t report is that they allowed an abusive cop and the two supervisory police officers who had his back to abuse me and my family on-line in front of the entire world. This officer had a documented problematic past that they didn’t bother looking into and four years later he shot a suicidal woman with mental illness who could have just as easily been me or Lee. Interestly enough, I was swatted two weeks before the aforementioned shooting after these same people used their article to dehumanize me. The police showed up to our home with no lights and guns drawn, and I was forced into a cop car and taken to the local hospital for a suicide assessment and quickly released. This was the second random person who called our police department from out-of-state, made up a lie, and the police department followed through with it as if it was gospel and never even questioned us. Is this how you think we should run our police departments?

DEHUMANIZED | THE SUN JOURNAL NARRATIVE SUPPORTING A KNOWN PROBLEMATIC AND DISTURBING POLICE OFFICER WHO ABUSED & INTIMIDATED TWO DISABLED VETERANS AND TWO KIDS DURING A MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS (2010):

Finance Committee member clashes with Rumford police over alcohol charge (February 24, 2010)

“Humanity cannot afford to ignore oppression and dehumanization in any circumstance, for it is in the collective acknowledgment of these injustices that we dismantle them and uphold the human rights of all, preserving the dignity of every individual.” -JTM Foundation

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE BOTH LAW ABIDING CITIZENS, HAVE ZERO CRIMINAL HISTORY, BOTH SERVED HONORABLY FOR OUR COUNTRY IN THE AIR FORCE, AND WERE BOTH MEDICALLY RETIRED DUE TO DISABILITIES AFTER 15 PLUS YEARS OF SERVICE.

The officer involved in this incident not only had disciplinary action taken in 2005 documenting his “deplorable” mistreatment of citizens, co-workers, and people in his custody but he was later involved in an officer involved shooting of a suicidal woman with mental illness. He continued to work long after he shot this woman for no reason. We don’t care what the Attorney General decided in the end; they have never once ruled that any police officer was unjustified in the shooting of a Maine citizen. Apparently, what this officer did to Lee and I when he responded to our mental health crisis doesn’t matter to the Police Department, the Town, and the Sun Journal for some unclear reason. If the Police Department thought Lee was a domestic abuser and he had already been arrested for it, why did they take ZERO action to find out if I was hurt or abused when I called for help? I know why. Because they know it wasn’t true. Lee’s ex-wife made those false allegations and called the police to create a narrative to make sure she was able to keep full custody of the two boys. I guess I was the victim? None of this makes sense.

This officer not only didn’t help two veterans in mental health crisis but he intimidated the entire family, took over our house, interviewed the two young kids only, never interviewed me or Lee, and when he got to me sitting alone and isolated on a couch in the half-basement trying to cope, he handed me a summons for an alcohol charge that Lee should have been charged with. The police department justified not charging him because he wasn’t in the house; how can they justify that this was a domestic altercation if he wasn’t in the house? Lee bought the beer and was also on the deed to the home but was never charged despite being in and out of the house that night; he was in crisis. Why did the officer only charge the two women in the home? I know why. Because his complaint history has an extensive amount of inappropriate behavior towards women. Lee was engulfed in a war with his ex-wife who wanted to make sure he didn’t get shared custody. The two women charged in the home were not involved in the situation whatsoever yet negatively impacted and the phone call was made to help Lee who was suicidal because he was losing his kids to manufactured domestic violence charges. We were all traumatized victims of circumstance.

This article has been pushing me to suicidal ideation since the day it was printed on February 24, 2010. It’s all lies and a narrative created by the “aggressive” and “intimidating” police officer and his supervisor cohorts who weren’t even there that night but they sure do talk like they were. In addition, the felony charges (not convictions because the charges were dropped) helped the ex-wife successfully keep the kids away from the “crazy” and “dangerous” veterans. It created more pain than you could ever imagine in our household. As a result of getting dragged into someone else’s battles, I wanted to die and was hospitalized in an in-patient psychiatric facility. It took me over a year and a half before I could even face it and take a stand for myself; first we had to hand the kids back over to the ex-wife to make the abuse stop. This was also around the time we were medically retired from the Air Force for mental health disabilities. I also had untreated chronic lead poisoning. Both the lead poisoning and the complex trauma rendered me helpless and vulnerable. Lee and I finally got the treatment we needed after we moved to California. The fact that this article is still on-line fourteen years later is the most egregious sh*t I have ever witnessed.

We keep up with Maine news and everything on the Sun Journal was behind a paywall except this hit piece article about my family and a close friend’s kid that I was supporting while she was going through a hard time. But as of May 30, 2024, the article is all of a sudden behind a paywall after years of just being out there for the whole world to judge us by and use as a weapon to “ruin us.” All four people in my home were coping with major mental health issues and were harmed in this article. Who quotes a minor kid and then cherry picks the information to make the supposed “victim of abuse” look like the aggressor? Once the police department got called out, they had to justify why they never questioned the “victim” in the supposed “domestic altercation.” Four different officers came at us in this article and the most problematic officer wasn’t available for comment? The cops and the Sun Journal are literally bullying two disabled veterans and two young kids on-line. I still haven’t recovered from the abuse from Lee’s ex-wife, the trigger happy police officers, or the media. Bad actors weaponized the system against Lee and I to dehumanize and discredit us as parents and as concerned community members.

MY ATTEMPT AT TAKING THE POWER BACK (2011):

The worst acts of humanity involve the aggressive dehumanization of a fellow being using leverage without remorse. It is time for the best too to be aggressive in re-humanizing our fellow beings using compassion and being remorseless about it.

The Sun Journal ignored me and obviously refused to post my Letter to the Editor. The Sun Journal is complicit in the abuse of two disabled veterans and two young kids. It hit me to my core and made me realize the cops, town, and media didn’t care if I died by suicide, domestic violence or suicide by cop. They also don’t care that a poor, abused kid from rural Maine left at 18 years old on their own and tried to do everything right in life only to have a local police department destroy my reputation with lies impacting my volunteer and employment opportunities in the future. The charges were f*cking dropped but this article has been thrown in my face multiple times, just the way it was intended to.

The Rumford Falls Times printed my Letter to the Editor but of course you cannot find this on-line. The Sun Journal was not only inaccurate, biased and one sided, but it serves no purpose except to hurt me and my husband and our reputations. The charges were dropped and no one would update the article with that information. It’s just left out there to make me look bad and has been thrown in my face multiple times. We had to beg them to remove our address because I am a rape survivor. I guess they didn’t care if my offenders in Maine harmed me either.

PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU CANNOT FIND THIS LETTER TO THE EDITOR PUBLISHED IN THE RUMFORD FALLS TIMES ON-LINE THEREFORE WE HAVE NO REBUTTAL UNTIL NOW.

Dear Editor,

I’m writing this letter in response to the new domestic violence signs that will be posted on the roads leading to Rumford. I respect law enforcement and am fascinated with forensic science but I do not respect those who abuse their power and take advantage of people and causes for political gain.

I USED to be on the Rumford Finance Committee. I started volunteering on the committee in 2007. I did my usual research before budget season began and learned that our police department is overstaffed compared to other towns in Maine with comparable populations. That particular year we had at least two openings in the department. After presenting my data to the other finance committee members, I implored them to cut the two vacant positions. Both the committee and the citizenry voted to eliminate those two positions and we went from a full-time force of 14 to 12. According to the US Census Bureau, we had less than 6500 people. According to the FBI Crime Index, we had very little violent crimes reported by the Rumford Police Department (RPD). This is how I became known by the permanent fixtures who still work for the RPD.

I am a tay-paying citizen of Rumford and very patriotic. In 2010, I called the RPD to assist me with my husband, who had been diagnosed with combat PTSD. He spent a significant amount of time overseas witnessing things that you and I would never dream of. His family, friends, and military peers respect him greatly for his service to this country. We also support him in his recovery from these traumatic events. I naturally expected that the RPD would understand the difference between domestic violence and PTSD. I assumed that they would understand his predicament and have some empathy for him. Four months earlier, the RPD took a call from someone out-of-state alledging my husband was abusing me. They arrived at my house and arrested my husband for domestic violence on the word of a person from Tennessee who was intentionally trying to discredit him in a legal setting.

I called them because I needed some assistance coaching someone with combat PTSD. They showed up at my house and talked to four people before they spoke with me, one of those people was my mother. By the time they got to me, I was automatically treated like a suspect. I was not asked what happened or why I called, I was instead accused of a crime and served with a summons for furnishing a home for a minor to consume, a felony. One of the police officers informed me that he smelled alcohol on the breath of one of the four people interviewed. So the focus immediately went from me asking for assistance to me being a supposed felon.

Two days later, there was an article in the newspaper about me. The article emphasized that I was a Finance Committee member who was also a supposed felon serving alcohol to minors. The Finance Committee was scheduled to meet the following week. My reputation was tarnished along with that of my husband’s. They were successful at discrediting me in front of my peers and the community.   I was very dedicated to my position on the Finance Committee. I advocated on behalf of the taxpayers of Rumford and tried to lower the budget to the best of my ability in an effort to reduce taxes. This felony charge and the ensuing newspaper article jeopardized all that I had worked so hard for. I have a Master’s Degree in Public Policy & Management. This incident affected me mentally, socially, and financially. It disheartened us greatly to learn that we cannot count on the RPD to protect us.

My husband’s case was dropped by the DA as well as mine. This information did not make the papers. In the future, I will refrain from calling the supposed public servants in Rumford, Maine. If I actually was a victim of domestic violence, I would have no where to turn. If I did need their help, why would I want to take the risk of getting charged with a manufactured crime?

The saddest part is that we pay high taxes for an overstaffed police force who isn’t there for us. Our Governor was a victim of domestic violence so he is making it his priority while in office, and I commend him for that. In my opinion, the RPD is using the plight of domestic violence victims for political gain. I think the money approved for the signs could have been better utilized for training our police department how to treat ALL citizens who reach out to them with respect and dignity.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Norris
Western Maine

“Do the right thing even when no one is looking.” – US Air Force

OUR CITIZEN COMPLAINT TO COP BLOCK AFTER THE SUN JOURNAL BLEW US OFF:

Citizen Complaint to Cop Block: Finance Committee Member Targeted for Political Purposes By Local Police Department During a Family Mental Health Crisis Turned “Domestic Disturbance”

PROBLEMATIC OFFICER IS INVOLVED IN OFFICER INVOLVED SHOOTING OF SUICIDAL WOMAN WITH MENTAL ILLNESS (2014):

Citizen Complaint to Attorney General: An Overview of Officer’s Disturbing History Prior to Involvement in Officer Involved Shooting of A Suicidal Woman With Mental Illness

I AM A RAPE SURVIVOR, PLEASE TAKE MY ADDRESS DOWN:

After this article was used against me once again to discredit my crime victim advocacy efforts, a couple of psychos decided to up the anti and swat me with the same police department they knew I was deathly afraid of. Two weeks later, he shot a suicidal woman with mental illness for no f*cking reason. As a result, we were scared for our lives, asked the Sun Journal to remove our address, and went into hiding. We isolated in our home for the next 8 years to hide our post traumatic stress and fell into a death spiral until we were forced to sell our home and save our lives. We thought we put the issue to bed with the Sun Journal because the article was removed at one point. But then it showed up again without our address in print and this time was wide open for everyone to see and not behind a paywall for over a decade.

AFTER OUR HEALTH IMPROVED, WE GOOGLED THE ARTICLE & THERE IT WAS (2023):

We love to keep up with the news in Maine. But everything at the Sun Journal was behind a paywall except the hit piece article about me, Lee (two disabled veterans), and two young kids.

AFTER OVER A DECADE OF HELL, THE SUN JOURNAL PUTS THE LIES AND ABUSE OF A THREATENING, INTIMIDATING TRIGGER HAPPY COP BEHIND A PAYWALL (2024):

Update: The article is still wide open for all the world to judge us by on the IPhone as of May 31, 2024.

Update 2: The article was put behind a paywall on iPhone as of June 2024.

Update 3: As of May 30, 2024, this Sun Journal article full of lies and narratives is behind a pay wall and you better believe that Lee and I are going to fight for it’s removal until the day we die.

As of August 2, 2025, despite asking the Sun Journal to do the right thing, they still have this defamatory article on-line, although it is behind a paywall on desktop. We’ve been googling it regularly. The article went from a Sun Journal article to an Advertiser Democrat article to now a Franklin Journal article. It should have been taken down, and if you’re not gonna take it down then it needs to be filed in the Rumford Falls Times section. The mobile site is behind a paywall too. The newspapers in Maine have a history of protecting the “authorities” and it shows.

MUCH LIKE ROBERT CARD’S FAMILY, WE’D LIKE TO KNOW WHY THE MAINE NATIONAL GUARD, THE DEPARTMENT OF VETERANS AFFAIRS, AND THE LOCAL POLICE DEPARTMENT WOULN’T LISTEN TO US AND INSTEAD MADE OUR SITUATIONS WORSE: