Cry for help in bottle message investigated on midcoast
BELFAST, Maine — A message found Thursday evening in a bottle floating in Belfast Harbor sparked a massive, two-community search for a possible kidnap victim.
“Please HELP sex offender has me on boat,” reads the note which was scrawled in black crayon and found in a plastic Sprite bottle by a Belfast boater, police said.
“The first thing that came into my mind the 11-year-old girl out west who was raped and held hostage by her abductor,” said Belfast Police Chief Jeffrey Trafton. “We’re working on a law enforcement bulletin. We’re going to go nationwide.”
He said that policemen and the harbormaster checked “every boat in the harbor” Thursday night and again on Friday morning. The department’s next step will be to cross-reference a list of people who hold moorings with a list of known sex offenders, Trafton said.
The department has learned something new — the Sprite bottle is from a series that’s only been distributed for a week and a half, so the note is no older than that.
The police are asking the public for help.
“What we want people to do is just wrack your brain a little bit. Did you see something unusual in and around the harbor?” asked Detective Michael McFadden of the Belfast Police Department. “Please let us determine if whatever you saw has anything to do with this.”
McFadden said that right now, the police don’t know if the note is legitimate.
“We don’t know if it’s a cry for help or a hoax,” he said. “Certainly, we want to err on the side of safety.”
Crews from the U.S. Coast Guard, Searsport Police Department and the Maine Marine Patrol also searched Thursday night for anything unusual.
Curtis Barthel, commanding officer of Coast Guard Station Rockland, sent a three-person crew to Belfast with the station’s small response boat, which arrived on scene at about 8 p.m.
“They shined the spotlight, seeing if there was anything peculiar, anything odd. There weren’t even any lights on the boats,” he said. “It was very quiet.”
Barthel pointed out that it is impossible to know how long the bottle had been drifting.
“It could almost come from anywhere,” he said.
He had another question, too.
“Somebody had that much time to write all that information out, I would have thought they’d have written a name or something,” he said.
But Trafton cautioned that if a person was writing under stress, they might not have been thinking rationally.
“You can Monday morning quarterback all you want,” Trafton said. “Maybe the person only had a short amount of time.”
McFadden said that it’s not unusual for the police to receive notes of this nature, but the delivery method is much less common.
“We get them in the mail, and in emails, and so on,” he said. “In my recollection, I can’t remember one coming in in the form of a message in a bottle.”
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