Man accused of killing pedestrian on MDI told police he thought he hit a deer
A Hancock man accused in the hit-and-run death of a Mount Desert Island mother of two told police he thought he hit a deer, according to a court affidavit.
According to police, John F. Holdsworth, 31, did not stop after striking Amber Ray Robbins, 35, on the night of June 10 as she walked along the side of Route 102 in Southwest Harbor. He instead drove to Bar Harbor and met up with friends and then returned to the scene. There, he picked up a piece of his truck that broke off in the collision but later told police he did not see Robbins’ body, according to Maine State Police Detective Dana Austin.
Holdsworth was arrested last week on a charge of manslaughter.
A graduate of Searsport High School in Waldo County, Robbins was a “fun, spirited soul” who loved Halloween and had two daughters aged 11 and 12, according to her family.
On the evening of June 10, Holdsworth had been celebrating a friend’s birthday in Southwest Harbor when he left around 11 p.m. to go meet up with another friend in Bar Harbor, according to police. It was when he was driving north on Route 102 near Carroll’s IGA supermarket in Southwest Harbor that he allegedly struck Robbins as she was walking alongside the road.
Holdsworth later told police that as he drove up the hill near the supermarket, he glanced away from the road to read a text message that appeared on a display screen on the dashboard of his truck. Police said they later found a tire impression matching the tires from Holdsworth’s truck on the soft dirt shoulder of the road where Robbins is believed to have been struck.
After meeting friends in Bar Harbor, one of them pointed out noticeable damage to the front passenger side of the vehicle to Holdsworth, but Holdsworth told the friend he did not know what caused it.
“Maybe I hit a deer, maybe a tree, I don’t know,” a friend, who later spoke with police, quoted Holdsworth as saying.
Not long after arriving in Bar Harbor, Holdsworth and two friends drove a friend’s car back to the collision scene to take another look and came across a trash bag in the road, which Holdsworth said must have been what he hit. Holdsworth got out of the vehicle, looked in the bag, retrieved a piece of his truck from the roadway and then got back in the car and drove back to Bar Harbor with his friends, police said.
It wasn’t until the next day, after his friends heard that Robbins’ body had been found in the ditch near where they had found the trash bag, that the friends surmised that Holdsworth may have struck and killed a person.
One of the friends then called Holdsworth on the afternoon of June 11 and told Holdsworth to contact police. If he didn’t call the police, the friend said he felt compelled to call them himself, according to the affidavit.
The friend, who had gone back to the collision scene with Holdsworth the previous night, later told police that he had no idea Robbins’ body was lying by the side of the road a few yards away.
“He reported that it kills him to know that this person was lying in the grass,” Austin wrote in the affidavit. “He stated that the fact they possibly could have helped somebody really eats away at his heart.”
About an hour after his friend told him to call the police, Holdsworth did so. He told police that, at the time of the crash, he thought he had hit a deer.
Holdsworth remains held without bail at Hancock County Jail, according to jail officials.