911 transcript details call reporting Freedom deaths

FREEDOM – The person who reported a propane leak at a home on Belfast Road last week two people died and two were taken to hospital was a caller from the Boston area who said his cousin was in the house at the time and called to inform him of the incident, according to a transcript of two 911 calls.

“Three are very sick and one isn’t even moving,” the caller said, asking if someone could come right away.

The caller, whose name appears in the transcript, said his cousin who called him from the Belfast Road home does not speak English.

“He said he could smell the (unintelligible) odor that he thinks is the propane leak,” the caller said.

Freedom firefighters and Waldo County Sheriff’s officials responded to 555 Belfast Road after receiving the call just after 6 a.m. on Oct. 22 to find two men dead, a man and a woman sick and another man unharmed. Officials later said a pipe on top of a wall-mounted propane heater, which was supposed to vent the propane outside, had separated from the heater, causing the leak. The heating was in a utility room in the house.

A week after the incident, sheriff’s officials are keeping investigative data close to the vest. They would not identify the names of the victims, either dead or alive, or anything about the conditions of those taken to the hospital.

Waldo County Sheriff’s Sgt. Cody Laite said Tuesday he had no new information to report.

“The investigation remains active and ongoing,” Laite said. “As a result, we are not releasing any further details.”

Most information around the death of the two people and the hospitalization of two others comes from Freedom Fire Chief Jim Waterman. When contacted Tuesday, he said he had no new information.

Waterman said yes at the end of last week no carbon monoxide detectors at the home when officials arrived early on Oct. 22. He said the concentration of carbon monoxide was 40 parts per million – which he described as a high concentration.

According to Waterman, the vent line at the top of the heating system was disconnected and could not come loose on its own. It “must have been disconnected somehow,” Waterman said.

The person who called 911 to report the leak told a dispatcher that the people at the Freedom House did not speak English. When asked what language they speak, the caller told the dispatcher it was Cantonese or Mandarin.

When Freedom firefighters arrived on the scene, they found one man dead in the living room and another dead in a bedroom off the living room, Waterman said. A man and a woman were taken to Waldo County General Hospital in Belfast.

The man who was uninjured has a phone with the New York City area code, he said. A message left at that number on Tuesday was not returned.

Attempts to reach the number of the person who called 911 were unsuccessful.

The property includes the house and several outbuildings that were raided by law enforcement in May as a site for an illegal cannabis grow, part of what authorities have called a network of illegal grow sites in rural Maine. The locations generally involved homes in rural areas.

Federal authorities have named the growing sites could be controlled by Chinese transnational criminal groups.

There were no visible signs of marijuana being grown on Freedom’s property after the deaths. Waterman confirmed he found no evidence of marijuana there.

The house and about 25 acres of vacant land on Evergreen Lane, about 2.5 miles from the house, are owned by Austin Zhen of Brooklyn, New York. Waterman said last week that he did not believe Zhen was in the house on October 22.

Waterman also said the man who was not injured spoke some English but could not tell him the identities of the dead men. The sheriff’s press release last week stated that the home was occupied by only four people.

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