It was a tragedy piled on a tragedy is how one Lincoln County resident described the December 27 homicide of a 41-year-old Corinth woman, allegedly at the hands of her 22-year-old son, who until recently lived in Damariscotta and Waldoboro.
Penobscot County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Daniel Derosier on Saturday after he fled the trailer where he’d been staying with his birth-mother, Abigail Thomas, lay slain by a gunshot wound. Witnesses told law enforcement Derosier pulled the trigger.
Until recently, the accused killer lived in Lincoln County where, public records show, he had racked up a troubling career of violent crime for such a young man.
Between 2020 and the present, a partial list of arrests include criminal threatening with a firearm, violation of a protection from abuse order, violation of conditions of release on multiple occasions, and illegal possession of a firearm.
Prior to his 18th birthday, Derosier had an encounter with the federal ATF bureau for illegally ordering chemicals to make a bomb, though that record was expunged when he became an adult. While a teenager, he reportedly blew up a swamp in Bremen.
The circumstances surrounding Derosier’s upbringing were reportedly very difficult, with his father dying of cancer while he was still an adolescent. Because he grew up in grinding poverty without the parental support many of his peers enjoyed, community members tried repeatedly to give the young man second chances one after another.
Yet he kept burning bridges – if not literally, than figuratively.
Estranged from his birth mother, Derosier went to live with her earlier this year when he had nowhere left to turn.
Thomas had since remarried and had another son, now a teenager when Daniel showed up. According to court records, an argument erupted between them in the early morning hours of December 27. Thomas had chided her son for how he was treating the dog, which evidently triggered a rapid escalation.
Derosier then allegedly burned the family’s rent money and smashed his mother’s phone with a hammer before fatally shooting her. He’d been having a manic episode, surviving family members said. Mental health challenges seemed to have plagued the young man for years.
“Broken beyond repair, I’m afraid,” one Lincoln County resident familiar with Derosier’s story told The Maine Wire. “A lot of people around here had been pulling for him, but unfortunately this is just turned out to be one of those instances where the system failed.”
Despite a clear record of violent behavior in the years leading up to Saturday’s apparent matricide, Derosier does not appear to have faced serious consequences despite an array of red flags. In multiple examples, prosecutors either reduced or dismissed altogether charges against the young man.
The Maine Wire contacted the Lincoln County District Attorney’s office on Tuesday afternoon, but as of noon on Wednesday received no response. We have also made FOAA requests of area law enforcement seeking a more detailed picture of how many times Derosier had been reported or caught displaying dangerous, anti-social behavior.
Derosier’s case stands at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum of Hollywood screw-up Nick Reiner’s, but the two men charged on opposite coasts with parricide in recent weeks share an uncanny bond: people really hoped they’d get better. Both seem to have serious mental health problems, and both exhibiting worrying signs of violence before killing their respective parents – one in a Hollywood mansion and the other in a Maine trailer park.
People were afraid of them. No one knew quite what to about either. Both recently came to live at home to disastrous effect. While the anti-gun crowd in Maine pats itself on the back for having passed a “Red Flag” law when it comes to firearms, such a measure would have done nothing to prevent Abigail Thomas’ killing. Derosier menaced others with guns whether he could legally handle them or not.
The real issue is human ticking time bombs, and what the people charged with keeping us safe are prepared to do about them. Shuffling them down the road serves no one.
Over the past year, The Maine Wire has chronicled scores of cases where violent criminals wound up quickly back on the streets after prosecutors or courts cut them slack. Our review of this systematic failure will continue in the months to come.
