The woman shot by a Penobscot County sheriff’s deputy Sunday was wielding a makeshift weapon made of two metal spikes hanging from lengths of rope, a witness said Monday.

Authorities say Alexis Lannon, 20, of the Bangor area was damaging property and threatening motorists with a “homemade weapon” on Route 2 about 9 a.m. Sunday when Penobscot County sheriff’s deputies responded.

Deputy Kari Kurth shot Lannon after she advanced on Kurth with the weapon, authorities said. Kurth is the deputy assigned to cover Carmel.

The Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office did not describe what kind of weapon Lannon was allegedly armed with. However, resident Don Tracy encountered Lannon shortly before the shooting at the end of his driveway. He said she was swinging something that consisted of two lengths of rope, about 2 feet long, with foot-long metal spikes at the end.

“My first thought was the old window weights in old houses,” he said, although he thought those would be too heavy for her to swing as she was doing. The woman was taking apart Tracy’s mailbox, he said, which he had made to resemble a pickup truck.

“I was on my way up to her and said, ‘Get out of here!’ I walked closer and said, ‘Get out of here!’ She says, ‘I can do anything I want to do,’ ” he recalled. “She said, ‘Do you want some of these?’ ” referring to the weapon. “She was swinging them, so I backed off. My wife yelled at me, ‘Get back down here!’ ”

The woman seemed preoccupied, he said. “I thought maybe she was one of these type of people that didn’t take her medication and was out of it, or she was on some kind of drugs,” he said.

The woman crossed the road, and swung the metal ends into the glass door of the town post office, prompting Tracy to call 911. Then she started walking down Main Road, also called Route 2, he said.

“She was walking in the middle of the road, straddling the yellow line, but walking really slow like she didn’t have a care in world,” he said.

One car stopped to avoid hitting her. Another car passed his house, slowed as it approached her, then turned around and headed in the opposite direction. Tracy said he did not see Kurth shoot Lannon but heard the sound of a single gunshot.

A 2012 investigation by the Portland Press Herald on officer-involved shootings in Maine found that between 2000 and 2012, 57 people were shot by police. The review found that 42 percent of them had mental health problems. Seven of the shootings were alcohol-related and two involved drugs.

Police departments have increasingly been training officers in ways to de-escalate confrontations with people in mental health crises. It’s unclear whether the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office had provided that training to Kurth.

A news release issued Sunday from Sheriff Troy Morton and Chief Deputy William Sheehan said Lannon was taken to a hospital for treatment. A hospital spokesman at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor said he had no information about Lannon. A spokesman for St. Joseph Hospital in Bangor said Lannon was not there.

The Maine Attorney General’s Office is investigating whether the shooting was justified, as it does in all cases in which officers use deadly force.

Lannon was arrested in 2013 on charges of assault and criminal threatening, both misdemeanors, according to the State Bureau of Identification. She pleaded guilty to the threatening charge, and the assault charge was dropped. She was ordered to perform 40 hours of community service.

Since 2014, Kurth has worked 40 hours per week for the town of Carmel through a contract with the sheriff’s office.

The incident was the sixth officer-involved shooting in Maine this year, according to the Attorney General’s Office. Only one of the shootings was fatal.