AUBURN — A Mechanic Falls woman filed a civil complaint against her ex-husband whom police said used his pickup truck to ram the minivan she was driving four years ago.
Laurie Stevens-Callahan was estranged from Michael Callahan on May 24, 2013, when he burned down his family’s former home, tried to burn down Stevens-Callahan’s mobile home in Mechanic Falls, rammed her minivan and attempted to run down a sheriff’s deputy, prosecutors said.
Stevens-Callahan had gotten a phone call in May 2013 from a former neighbor of her family’s home in Minot, saying the house was on fire. Shortly after that, she left work at the Elm Street School in Mechanic Falls in her minivan, then noticed her husband was behind her in his pickup truck. He rammed her vehicle in a church parking lot, spinning the minivan. She got out of the vehicle and ran and hid from him. Shortly afterward, she learned her mobile home in Mechanic Falls where she had been living also was on fire.
Stevens-Callahan called Poland Regional High School and Minot Consolidated School and asked the principals to lock down the schools, fearing Michael Callahan might come for their children. She asked a friend to pick them up and told the school to release them only to her friend.
The trouble had started in December 2012 when Callahan began arguing with his teenage daughter at the family’s Minot home. Stevens-Callahan fled the home with their two kids.
Callahan created a police standoff for more than six hours when he fired off from his sizable arsenal nearly 100 rounds at police who had surrounded his home.
He had been released on bail when he returned to the Minot home in May 2013 where police said he set the family’s former home ablaze.
In 2014, a judge sentenced Callahan, then 45 years old, to 20 years in prison with eight years suspended, plus a total of 12 years on probation on related criminal charges.
In her complaint, filed in May at Androscoggin County Superior Court, Stevens-Callahan claimed that Callahan had driven his truck “in a negligent manner, striking the vehicle which Plaintiff was operating.”
She was injured in the collision, her complaint says, and “suffered medical expenses, medical treatment, property damages, permanent impairment, emotional distress and other special damages.”
Her complaint doesn’t seek a specified dollar amount of damages.