14 DAY TRIAL // A Maine man woke up to police officers and a group of troopers with assault rifles in his driveway on Tuesday morning, after tree-removal workers thought they had seen a gun stuffed into his waistband.
Michael Smith, from Norridgewock, went outside his house shirtless and started yelling at Lucas Tree Experts workers to get off his property because he couldn't sleep. The workers from the landscape company thought they saw a handgun tucked in his pants and immediately called the police.
However, what they really saw was just a life-sized tattoo of a handgun on the man's stomach.
Maine State Police, backed up by troopers armed to the teeth, arrived at Mr. Smith's home and asked him via a megaphone to come out of his house. When the man got out, they realized that the employees of the tree-removal company had mistaken his tattoo for a real gun.
“Obviously it was a misunderstanding and he didn’t have a weapon, but we had to respond to the initial report as if he did. We take all precautions when we don’t have the details,” Maine State Police Trooper Scott Duff said, according to Online Sentinel.
Smith says that he is working night shifts and he was sleeping at his home on Ray Nors Drive when he heard a loud noise outside of his window. When he got out, he was surprised to see that a team of workers were sawing some trees to protect the power lines on his property.
He got angry and started yelling at them, asking them to leave. Given the distance between Smith and the workers, they thought the tattoo was actually a real firearm and got scared.
“They weren’t 100 percent sure what he was saying, but he was yelling and they thought it could be some sort of a threat,” Duff said. “They thought he was yelling something to the effect of doing harm, but when we got a hold of him, it ended up just being a tattoo.”
The police trooper also said that he doesn’t think Smith went outside shirtless intentionally in order to intimidate the workers. “I’m not sure what his mindset was, but he wasn’t pointing to his gun or anything like that,” he said.
No charges will be filed against Smith as a result of this incident.
There have been several police standoffs with armed men in the past several years in central Maine, so police always takes reports of a gun threat seriously.