Biddeford’s hard work to usher in an urban renaissance has been challenged of late by one family where murder appears to run in the bloodlines.
In this still-randy mill city, the sister of a guy who shot and killed her boy toy has now pleaded guilty to her own, violent form of enforcing her own brand of Biddeford-Saco silence.
Ariana Tito, 19, of Biddeford pleaded guilty to elevated aggravated assault with the use of a firearm in the shooting of her brother’s gal pal. An attempted-murder charge was dropped as part of a plea deal.
A judge ordered Tito, who smiles defiantly at the camera in her mugshot, to serve eight years in prison followed by four years of probation.
Tito is the sister of Lorenze Labonte, who was charged with killing Ahmed Sharif, 27, in Biddeford two years ago.
Sharif was Tito’s boyfriend. Tito shot her brother’s 32-year-old fiancee, Kayla Grant, the morning after her brother’s arrest so the woman would keep quiet about her brother’s case, according to cops.
Labonte, 26, charged with murder in connection with the shooting death of Sharif, is behind bars awaiting trial.
“All in the family” apparently didn’t stop there.
Labonte’s uncle, Garret Labonte of Biddeford, was arrested last year and charged with murder in the fatal shooting of Gene Dares, 46. Uncle Garret is in jail, also awaiting trial.
Another individual charged in that killing was Linda Lambert, 57, also of Biddeford.
So much for what municipal officials claimed was a “renaissance” in the gritty, blue-collar mill town that allegedly began with the city buyout and razing of the Maine Energy Recovery Co.’s trash incinerator. They called it a major source of odor and a visual blight that was stalling their attempted downtown redevelopment.
“It’s the beginning of an incredible new era for the city,” a dreaming City Manager John Bubier told the dimple-cheeked Portland Press Herald in 2012 as he signed the documents at City Hall, a block from the incinerator and its towering smokestack.
“We will no longer be known as a stink town,” then-council president Rick Laverriere told Portland’s favorite rag back then. “There’s no looking back now.”
Or forward, by all appearances.
A full 13 years after the incinerator was shut down the city’s “recovery” hasn’t taken hold, no matter how many bistros have opened on Main Street.
