Portland cops arrest and “torture” victim of roadside assault
Pursuit of OUI charges trumps medical treatment for injured drivers
Around 8 p.m. on the night of New Year’s Day, 70-year-old Bill Lundgren, a divorced hospice and Meals On Wheels volunteer who teaches English at Southern Maine Community College, went to a neighborhood bar near his Deering Center home for dinner and a couple cocktails. There he saw Thomas Puschock, 41, a construction supervisor who also frequented the place, and the two acquaintances struck up a casual conversation during which Puschock remarked that he didn’t have a ride home.
“I'm leaving in a little bit,” Lundgren offered. “If you can put up with being slobbered over by two Springer Spaniels, I'll give you a ride.”
Puschock gratefully accepted, and around 9 p.m., soon after they crossed Washington Avenue heading north on Allen Ave., Puschock asked Lundgren to pull over. He did so, figuring they were near Puschock’s home, and suddenly something horrible happened. Without warning or the slightest provocation, Lundgren said, Puschock began viciously punching him in the face and head, possessed by a blind drunken rage.
“If I wouldn't have gotten out of my car, I think he would have killed me,” Lundgren told The Bollard last weekend during an interview at his home. He opened his driver’s side door and tumbled out onto the pavement as his dogs panicked in the back. Puschock exited from his side and fled into the wooded neighborhood nearby. Passengers in a vehicle behind Lundgren’s stopped when they saw him hit the frozen ground and approached to administer aid.
“I can’t even see, I'm bleeding so badly,” Lundgren recalled. He believes the good samaritans were off-duty first-responders. “They were awesome,” he said. “They just took control. They got the blood off my face and calmed me down.” They also placed an emergency call to help the stunned and beaten senior, who underwent major back surgery about a year ago, then left after police arrived.
“When the cops showed up, I'm like, Oh, good. Finally this nightmare is about to end,” Lundgren recalled. “Instead, it was just fucking starting.”
“From the moment they got out of their car, I was a criminal,” he continued. “The first thing that they should have done with me is taking me to the emergency room. Instead, they were hell-bent on filling their DUI quota for the month, and they were convinced that I was drunk.”
The two Portland police officers, both white men, demanded Lundgren perform a field sobriety test. “I said, ‘Guys, I just got the shit kicked out of me. I can barely stand up and you want me to walk a straight line?’”
They did. And after another field test, this one of the assault victim’s eye movements, “they didn't say I failed, but that's when they cuffed me,” said Lundgren, “and they cuffed me violently and fucking threw me in the back of the car. It was physical abuse.”
Lundgren was livid and “bewildered,” thinking, “Holy shit, I'm the criminal here suddenly. How the fuck did that happen?”
He’d told the officers he’d been assaulted and even called the bar at the scene to get Puschock’s last name for them. The patrolmen seemed wholly uninterested and unconcerned about the attack, or that a violent man in a drunken rage was then wandering among the houses and businesses nearby in sub-freezing temperature. “‘Oh, there's three outstanding warrants out for him right now,’” Lundgren said he was told offhandedly. “‘Don't worry about him. There's other officers pursuing him.’”
The handcuffs were extremely tight and had been applied by forcing Lundgren’s arms behind him. Laying on his back, with his hands and shackled wrists crushed beneath his body weight, was too painful, so he sprawled across the backseat on his stomach as the cruiser slowly drove to the Cumberland County Jail six miles away.
“I'm in the backseat of the squad car screaming because I was in such agony,” Lundgren recalled. “I might have a low threshold of pain, but it was the most painful thing I ever experienced in my life. And they were getting off on it,” he said of the two Portland cops. “They thought it was amusing. They’re just kind of smirking. And when I would say, ‘Can you loosen these [handcuffs] up?’ they would say, ‘No. That'd be a violation of policy. Once they're on, they're on.’
“I said, ‘You're fucking torturing me,’ which is what it was,” Lundgren added. “They didn't give a shit.”
Upon arriving at the jail, the cops pulled Lundgren out of the cruiser by his feet and marched him, still handcuffed, inside, where they attempted to give him a breathalyzer test. Apparently, the machine there wasn’t working properly, and lacking a functional breathalyzer elsewhere in Portland, the officers drove him to a police station somewhere in South Portland and made him blow into another device.
The result, according to Lundgren, was a blood-alcohol level of .05, about half the legal threshold for a drunk driving charge (.08), and a level that accords with Lundgren’s story that he’d consumed two mixed drinks and a full meal before leaving the restaurant an hour or so prior to the test.
The cops were “crestfallen” upon seeing that result, said Lundgren, but they had a theory they believed would justify charging him with drunk driving anyway. “‘If that first breathalyzer would’ve worked, you would have been charged with the DUI,’” they said, according to Lundgren. Whereupon he exploded in indignant anger again.
“‘And that's my fault that you can't get technicians to get equipment that works, you fucking morons?’” he screamed at them. “I was in their face. … They're such incompetent motherfuckers.”
Finally, Lundgren was transported in the cop car to the emergency room at Maine Medical Center in Portland’s West End, admitted as an “incarcerated suspect.” A young ER doctor eventually stitched up the gashed brow above his right eye and bandaged his badly bruised right ear. Lundgren wrist, ribs and back were also in significant pain, he was having difficulty taking deep breaths, and he was experiencing what his doctor later called “brain fog” caused by a severe concussion, the effects of which continued for over a week.
The nightmare also continued into the following week.
The Portland Police Department had called Maietta Towing to remove Lundgren’s Toyota Tacoma pickup from the scene, but when Lundgren called to retrieve it the following morning, neither the cops nor the South Portland wrecker company could find it. After numerous phone calls and about two hours, the truck was finally located in a tow lot; Lundgren had to pay $150 to get it back.
His traumatized dogs had been brought to the Animal Refuge League in Westbrook, where he had to pay another $125 to regain custody of them following a prolonged application process and a mini-investigation shelter staff undertook to confirm he’s their rightful owner (despite the fact both Spaniels have chips indicating Lundgren owns them and they live at his house).
On Friday, Jan. 3, Lundgren went to police headquarters on Middle Street to file a complaint against the two officers. He was told a copy of the incident report would be sent to him in five days, and a senior officer there sat him down to chat.
The erudite English professor refers to this smooth-talking supervisor as Mr. Oleaginous, or Officer Friendly. Speaking of the patrolmen, this officer said, “‘Well, you know, you were contentious with them,’” according to Lundgren, who replied, “‘I was not contentious with them until they were fucking with me. They started it.’”
The senior officer also repeated the patrolmen’s contention that Lundgren had been too drunk to drive that night, saying, “‘You probably were over the limit when they first encountered you,’” Lundgren recalled.
“‘That's fucking speculation,’” Lundgren shot back. “‘You have no fucking idea.’ And again, I mentioned, if you can't get your breathalyzer to work, that's on you. I should have been taken to the hospital immediately, and they could have done a simple blood test right there to determine my blood alcohol content.”
On Tuesday, Jan. 7, The Bollard e-mailed Portland police spokesman Brad Nadeau with questions about the cops’ response to Lundgren’s assault, as well as their response to another, similar incident that happened in Portland last spring.
In that incident (the details of which are the subject of a forthcoming article in this investigative series), a Portland brewery owner badly injured in a traffic accident after work was cuffed, stuffed, and booked on suspicion of OUI by Portland police responding to the medical emergency call made by a bystander on his behalf. Only after a nurse at the jail directed officers to bring him to a hospital for emergency treatment were his injuries addressed, and those injuries may have been aggravated by being transported, half hog-tied, in the backseat of a police vehicle for many miles.
The victim in this case is currently challenging the OUI charge Portland police filed against him that day; a dispositional conference is scheduled for next month.
The Bollard asked the department last Tuesday to explain its policy when officers encounter an assault or traffic accident victim whom they believe may have been drinking. We also queried them regarding their apparent lack of breathalyzers, asked why seemingly no effort was being made to apprehend Puschock that night or in the days afterward, and requested the names of the two responding officers and the supervisor who met with Lundgren on Jan. 3.
Nationally, concern has been raised that grant and incentive programs promoting OUI enforcement can lead officers to pursue bogus or marginal drunk driving cases, so we also asked Nadeau if the PPD currently has any such grants or programs.
The spokesman briefly responded via e-mail a few hours later: “We are not going to comment on these active/open cases.” When The Bollard followed up the next day to confirm that all the information we’d requested was considered secret, Nadeau provided a link to the PPD’s Standard Operating Procedures and also wrote: “Mr. Lundgren was charged on 1/1/25, the day of his arrest. In this case, we are not able to release the names of anyone involved with the active investigation.”
When Lundgren, also on Jan. 8, followed up to get the incident report he’d been promised five days prior, police said he’d have to ask a judge to order the department to produce that document during the discovery period of his forthcoming criminal prosecution; his first court date is also next month. The cops claim Lundgren received a summons for OUI the night he was attacked, but Lundgren said he has no memory of that, nor any related documents. If he was formally charged, he has no memory of being read his rights, but acknowledged that the state of shock he was experiencing, combined with the concussion, may have affected his memory of events after the attack.
Puschock, meanwhile, is still a free man. Reached by cell phone on Jan. 8, he told The Bollard he hadn’t been contacted by the police. He denied that he has any active warrants, but acknowledged he’s on probation, the terms of which prohibit him from drinking alcohol. His criminal record since 2018 includes multiple arrests in Portland on charges including aggravated assault, domestic violence assault and aggravated criminal trespass.
When Lundgren finally got his truck back on Jan. 2, he discovered Puschock’s wallet inside and called him. Puschock arrived at his house around lunchtime with a co-worker and a sandwich he’d made for Lundgren. Puschock’s face was badly scraped up and puffy.
Lundgren said he confronted his attacker/acquaintance. “I said, ‘Thomas, what the fuck was that all about last night?’ He's like, ‘What? I don't know what you're talking about.’ I said, ‘You tried to kill me,’ and he got immediately so contrite, and immediately he knew that he had done it, and [said] he had blacked out. He had absolutely no recollection of it.” Lundgren also said Puschock told him he’d done something similar before: beating up a friend for seemingly no reason during a drunken blackout.
Speaking with The Bollard, Puschock denied that he told Lundgren about a previous fight, but also told us he has no memory of assaulting Lundgren on New Year’s Night. He said the first thing he remembers about the incident was seeing police lights in the area as he tried to find the wooded trail back to his home in East Deering. Puschock added that unlike his face, his hands were unscarred the next day, so he isn’t certain that he actually attacked Lundgren.
Lundgren formally filed assault charges against Puschock on Jan. 9, and while he was at police headquarters, they informed him that the department initiated its own charges against Puschock on the night of the incident.
Court documents pertaining to the police department’s OUI charge against Lundgren identify one of the two officers who responded to the assault call: Cody Curtsinger, who was sworn in during the summer of 2022, according to a PPD Facebook post. The officer in the case last April against the brewer is identified in court documents as Matthew Payoczkowski, who joined the force in 2019.
In the Standard Operating Procedures manual, the section on “alcohol enforcement countermeasures” reads: “The Portland Police Department recognizes that operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs is a serious problem that threatens the safety of the public. In an effort to combat this problem, the Department urges all officers to be alert for the signs of alcohol and/or drug impairment in all contacts with motorists, and make every effort to apprehend violators.”
But in Section Two, under “Professional Conduct and Responsibility,” it says that while on duty, officers shall “at all times take appropriate action to protect life and property; aid the injured; preserve the peace; prevent crime; detect and arrest violators of the law; and enforce Federal, State and local laws…”
The injunctions to “aid the injured” while also making “every effort to apprehend violators” in situations that may involve OUI appear to be at odds, with the compulsion to make arrests prevailing over the medical needs of injured people, at least in these two cases.
“I don't really like cops, but I've always kind of trusted them to do the right thing,” said Lundgren. “I have had really good experiences with them, too, like when my weed got stolen.”
Lundgren called the Portland police a few years ago when someone stole marijuana he’d been legally growing in his backyard garden. “That cop was so awesome, and helpful, and just courteous. These guys [on New Year’s Night] were the absolute antithesis of that. … [T]hey were so egregiously invested in fucking me up, and it just really destroyed any confidence I will ever have in the police ever again. … I'm never trusting a cop ever again, after the way that they treated me.”
Lundgren has contributed numerous book reviews to The Bollard over the years, as well as a couple cover stories, including “Up Long Creek Without a Paddle” [Sept. 2019], about his work on a 2006 project designed to help kids incarcerated in Maine’s youth prison tell their stories. He sees the world through a reader’s eyes.
“It's like I ended up in the middle of a Kafka novel, The Trial,” the professor said of his recent ordeal. “For 500 pages, he's on trial, and they never tell him what for. They never tell him what he's being charged with. This is very similar. God damn.”