One man is dead and a woman is missing after a wild night of gunshots and two house fires in south central Maine.
The incident began with a 911 just before 1 a.m. Saturday morning from a woman who told Auburn police dispatchers that her female significant other was in a fight with a man who was trying to break into their home with a gun, Deputy Chief Tim Cougle said. Gunshots were heard on the 911 call, and the 911 caller escaped the home through a window when she heard the gunshots.
Arriving police officers found the woman down the road from her home, which was now engulfed in flames and “yelling could be heard” coming from inside the home, Cougle said.
The woman who called 911 identified the man with the gun as 43-year-old Leein Hinkley, who fired at officers and deputies on the scene at about 1:15 a.m. Auburn police requested a tactical team from Maine State Police just before Hinkley fired at them again. By 1:30 a.m., police reported fire at an adjacent home.
Hinkley fled the home to a garage at a neighboring home, Cougle said, but fled that spot as well when the homeowner alerted police he was there.
“Mr. Hinkley fled the garage, making his way to a rooftop, a flat rooftop, on a home just down the street,” where he was brandishing his gun, he said.
Maine State Police Colonel William Ross said his tactical team located Hinkley at about 5:30 a.m., still on the rooftop, and he was “shot and killed by Maine State Police tactical team members.”
The 911 caller’s significant other is still missing, Cougle said, noting that two homes were destroyed in the fires.
The two troopers involved have been placed on administrative leave while the state’s attorney general’s office investigates the shooting. Maine State Police is also handling the criminal investigation.
Hinkley, Ross said, had been released on bail on June 12 following his arrest on a probation violation from a 2011 domestic violence arrest plus a new incident of domestic violence. A judge lowered his bail over the objection of prosecutors, Ross said.
Residents in the area spent several hours sheltering in place during the incident. Auburn is the county seat of Androscoggin County and the “twin sister city” of Lewiston, the neighboring town where 40-year-old Robert Card gunned down 18 people and wounded 13 others in two scenes in October 2023, as CrimeOnline reported. Police searched for him for more than 48 hours before finding his body in a tractor trailer, dead from a self inflicted gunshot wound.
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