Parents, grandmother charged with murdering Bangor boy had ‘indifference’ to human life

The three people charged with murdering a 10-year-old Bangor boy earlier this month did so with “indifference to the value of human life,” court records released Thursday said.

The boy’s father, mother and paternal grandmother were charged Wednesday with depraved indifference murder for his Feb. 18 death. Joshua Smith, 33; Jem Bean, 35; and Mistie Latourette, 56, all of Bangor, engaged in conduct that did not value human life and led to the death of the boy, according to a criminal complaint filed in Penobscot County Superior Court.

The Maine attorney general’s office declined to release the name of the child.

Bean, Latourette and Smith are in the Penobscot County Jail. Their first appearance is scheduled for Friday.

The boy was taken to a local hospital on Feb. 18 with life-threatening injuries. The hospital notified Bangor police and the Department of Health and Human Services. He died overnight.

He was not a student at Bangor School Department, spokesperson Ray Phinney said.

Four neighbors of the family at Birch Hill Estates, a mobile home park in north Bangor behind Judson Heights, off Broadway, told the Bangor Daily News on Thursday that they did not know the family. No one answered the door at four other trailers in the area.

Bean works for the Department of Health and Human Services at Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Hospital in Bangor in an administrative position, DHHS spokesperson Lindsay Hammes said. She does not do direct patient care or interact with children or Child Protective Services, Hammes said.

State and federal laws don’t allow DHHS to comment on child protective matters in most cases, Hammes said. The department declined to say if it had previously investigated the family.

Smith has a misdemeanor conviction of operating under the influence from 2012. Bean and Latourette do not have criminal histories in the state of Maine.

BDN writer Kathleen O’Brien contributed reporting to this story.