A Maine State Police detective was struck and killed Wednesday morning on Interstate ninety-five in Hampden in what Col. John Cote referred to as a “weird” twist of fate.
Ben Campbell was out of doors, his cruiser on the web page of a disabled vehicle south of the Coldbrook Road overpass at approximately 7:30 a.m. At the same time, he turned into struck using a tire that had separated from the wheel of a logging truck, Cote said Wednesday afternoon at a press conference in Bangor. “Bizarre is the simplest phrase I can think of,” Cote said. “It defies clarification.”
Headed to an education assignment in Augusta where he was scheduled to be the teacher, Campbell had pulled to the aspect of the street to assist an automobile that had spun off the southbound lanes and became pointed north all through Wednesday morning’s blizzard. As a logging truck approached the scene, tires separated from the front axle of the trailer. One rolled into the median between the northbound and southbound lanes even as the other struck Campbell, then the car he was helping.
The colonel started the commercial automobile department to cross over the tractor-trailer to determine why the tires got off the front passenger facet of the three-axle trailer loaded with logs. Unfortunately, the truck became pushed through Scott Willett, 52, of Patten, the owner of Scott Willett Trucking. Willett stopped after he realized what happened. Cote stated he was taken in for a blood test, which is well known in a deadly twist of fate. Unfortunately, results have been no longer available past due Wednesday.
Information about the disabled car Campbell stopped to assist turned into not launched at the press convention. Cote said the driver witnessed the detective being struck by using one of the tires and changed into the primary to call 911. Cote, Campbell, 31, lived in Millinocket with his spouse, Hilary, and a six-month vintage son, Everett. He changed into a detective with the polygraph unit. Campbell was taken to Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where he died, Cote stated.
Funeral plans are pending. Once family participants arrived from Massachusetts, where Campbell grew up, his body could be taken to the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office for an autopsy. That’s the general procedure, Cote stated. After that, it might be escorted to Augusta by troopers in a caravan.
“This has been a hard day,” Cote instructed participants of the media, his voice breaking with emotion. “It has been a tragic day for the Campbell circle of relatives with the loss of Detective Campbell. We misplaced one in all our very exceptional, and we’ve lost one of Maine’s very pleasant.” Maine State Police detectives, soldiers, and the Maine Warden Service contributors crowded into the conference room where the press conference was held and the wreck room behind it.
“Ben Campbell certainly became one of our very nice and nicely-liked,” Cote stated. “This is going to be a loss.” Police closed the southbound lanes of I-95 just north of the crash website online and diverted visitors at Exit one hundred eighty following the crash. The southbound lanes had reopened by early Wednesday afternoon.
Campbell’s death is the primary line of the obligation of a country trooper dying because of Oct. 17, 1997. Detective Glenn Strange died of a coronary heart assault after a drunken driving force kicked and punched him inside the chest Linneus, in keeping with the Maine State Police. Eleven troopers have died within the line of obligation because, in 1924, four of them were in the 1990s. So far this year, 29 police officers across the U.S. Have killed within the line of obligation, including six who were struck by using vehicles, consistent with the internet site Officer Down Memorial Page, which tracks officers’ line-of-duty deaths. In current years, the quantity of officials killed annually after being struck via motors has hovered around five.
