Days after the arrest and preliminary charging of a suspect in the murder of Sunshine “Sunny” Stewart, a new question has begun to surface in the towns surrounding Union, Maine: could 17-year-old Deven Young have acted alone in the brutal slaying of an innocent paddle-boarder?
Or, if the young man with apparent cognitive issues is indeed brighter than he looks, was Sunny Stewart his first victim? Killers often botch their first attempt at murder, and Stewart was a capable woman by all accounts. Were Young able to murder her single-handedly and evade detection for two weeks, there is some reason to suspect that hers not have been his first killing of a human.
“Sunny was in the best physical shape ever (before her killing),” one friend told The Maine Wire when asked how a doughy 17-year-old could have overpowered her. Could he have feigned injury on 100 Acre Island, where he was known to fish and spend a good deal of time, in order to appeal to the St. George woman’s well-known altruistic tendencies and lure her ashore?
“She could have easily outrun him,” another friend told The Maine Wire. “The only way I could see this happening is if he surprised her somehow.”
Once the relief of having a suspect in custody after two weeks of rippling fear and widespread mystery began to ebb over, questions like these have been percolating with the morning coffee at area stores, breakfast spots, and online in chatter among perplexed Knox County residents.
“Did he really act alone?” one area resident asked The Maine Wire. “Was he capable of pulling off such a horrible crime all by himself?”
Adding to the mystery is a Saturday report in the Midcoast Villager in which Mic Mac Cove Campground owner Kathy Lunt stated that Young only became known to the Maine State Police’s on July 16, the day of his arrest, by approaching investigators and volunteering information about the killing.
That’s right, if what Lunt told the local paper is correct, Young would have continued to evade detection had he not bizarrely put himself in the cross-hairs. That day he reportedly led troopers to 100 Acre Island and then fingered the wrong site, across the island from where the body was actually found. Still, his interaction with authorities was enough to capture their interest in him – nearly two weeks after the investigation was launched.
One source told The Maine Wire over the weekend that authorities had begun taking DNA swabs of construction workers building a dock on the pond earlier last week. Could Young, who had apparently been lurching around the campground from the July 2 killing until his July 16 arrest, have witnessed this activity and wanted to get in on the action? His outreach to police remains baffling leaving one to speculate whether it was driven by reason — an ill-considered effort to throw them off course — or irrational impulse.
In her recent interviews with the Midcoast Villager, Lunt goes to some length to counter online commentary that the Mic Mac Cove Campground environment might have contributed to Stewart’s death. She refutes reports that Young had harassed other campers, stolen from campsites and made a general nuisance of himself and states that one report that he threatened a younger camper with a knife is untrue.
Yet Mic Mac’s reviews online tell a different story. There is a 2018 account on Trip Advisor that complains of a bully who tried to drown younger campers (Deven would have been ten then, and his family only started coming to Mic Mac in 2023, so that would presumably be a separate incident, yet reflective of a culture of hard partying and loose oversight of children). In parallel with this pattern of complaints, are fierce denials from Lunt at each instance.
This reporter experienced Lunt’s defensiveness first hand after an encounter on July 6, when she told me she couldn’t speak at that time because she was refereeing a corn hole tournament but would later if I called her. I did, left a message which she didn’t return, and when I wrote that she hadn’t got back to me.
The day that first article appeared, Lunt left me disappointed and then irate voice messages and sent me various contradictory texts suggesting I’d mischaracterized the exchange, that the police had instructed her not to speak with the press, and then that the police had not yet instructed her to avoid media.
Then, over the next 36 hours, both the Maine Wire and I received abusive and at times threatening texts from various men objecting to our having written about Lunt. The tone of all of it was eery to put it mildly: a defensiveness beyond what the trying events could be expected to engender.
Lunt and Young’s mother, Tara Wright-Young, are reported to have been close friends, and are connected on Facebook. Some individuals online recount having complained about Deven to Lunt and been told he was working through some issues and not to worry about him.
Lunt told the Midcoast Villager that Deven was “not on her radar screen” at all and had only been helpful around the campground. It is of course possible that she was be sympathetic to Wright-Young and trying to see the best in Deven, as adults often do with troubled children.
None of this is meant to pile on Lunt — regardless of whether another array of dark midnight messages will inevitably follow this article — but rather to point out that, since the alleged killer had been roaming about Mic Mac for nearly two weeks after the killing, heightened scrutiny of the campground and its environment was indeed warranted, and perhaps we should have pressed harder than we did.
Lunt also told the Midcoast Villager that surveillance video showed Young heading off to the island in a boat before Stewart herself departed on her paddle board at approximately 6 p.m. that evening.
Another area of inquiry that demands a closer look is the atmosphere in which Deven Young lived prior to the evening of July 2. There have been reports of his family being asked to leave the Sebasticook campground near Newport, Maine before their appearance at Mic Mac two years ago because of complaints. There have also been reports of violence in the home, and of Deven’s mistreatment of animals.
In Deven’s Facebook feed (now removed from the platform but not before a great deal of online scrutiny), the young man himself posted in 2024 about the family’s dog having gone missing. In the wake of recent events, that raises an eyebrow. Was the family dog ever found, and if so, in what condition?
A recent article by the New England Serial Killer Facebook page administrator Philip Brunelle recounts complaints that Deven tortured and killed squirrels, and was no longer allowed to have pets because too many had suffered internal injuries or died.
On the now-deleted Deven Young Facebook page, he reportedly posted about having met a new friend in the last month whom he said was a lot like him. Hopefully that is an avenue investigators are pursuing in what the state has said is a still-open case.
Curiously, Young’s page showed that he had been following that of the Maine State Police. More revelations of his activities between the time of the Stewart murder and his approach to investigators on July 16 are sure to follow.
