The outcome of a stand-off on a Bangor roof Wednesday was up in the air for seven hours as a man claiming his drugs were in the chimney of a 14th Street home refused to surrender his high position, multiple reports indicate.
According to Bangor police, 39-year-old Stephen Nason climbed on to the roof of Veronica Levesque’s house at around 4 a.m. On hearing noises, Levesque contacted authorities who responded to the scene and discovered Nason on the roof, uttering nonsense and refusing to come down.
As the day wore on, temperatures hit 91 degrees, but Nason remained on the metal roof, refuting reason and shouting expletives.
At one point, the Bangor Fire Department sent a basket of a ladder truck up the roof to assist the apparently drug-addled man’s descent, but instead of coming down, Nason seized an axe from the basket and began swinging it around and poking at the chimney with it in an apparent attempt to recover what he claimed were his lost narcotics.
“We deal with this stuff every day. This is abnormal and it went on that long and somebody climbed on the top of somebody’s roof. That’s weird. People under the influence or in crisis is a regular part of the job at Bangor PD,” Bangor Police Sgt. Jason McAmbley told a local TV station.
After a patient stand-off, police were able to get Nason off the roof around 11:30 a.m. and take him to a hospital for evaluation. He was charged with aggravated criminal mischief on account of the damage he did to the chimney, police said. Nason’s first police stand-off dates back to 2011.
Police confirmed there were no drugs in the chimney.
