The Gardiner man who was caught by police hours after robbing a city pharmacy in August was sentenced to more than four years in prison on Friday.
Jesse Mansir, 31, told police last year that he stole oxycodone from the Rite Aid pharmacy on Spring Street to feed his opiate addiction. He said he wasn’t armed despite writing that he had a weapon in a threatening note to a pharmacy employee on a torn grocery receipt. He was caught after a manhunt in the woods off Harrison Avenue nine hours after the Aug. 21 robbery.
In October, Mansir pleaded guilty to robbery in U.S. District Court in Bangor. On Friday, he was sentenced to 51 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release. Mansir has a long criminal history, with several convictions in Kennebec County stretching back a decade, including drug possession, assault, disorderly conduct and theft, according to published court records.
Mansir’s arrest came after police identified him from surveillance footage and employees picked him out of a photo array. The pill bottle that he was given also contained a GPS device, which police tracked to Highland Avenue, where he lived with a girlfriend and a baby. He told police that “he spent most of the rest of the day in the woods getting high,” according to a police affidavit. He was detained at gunpoint just after 7 p.m. after being hunted by state and city police, sheriff’s deputies and dog teams.
That robbery was the third in the Augusta area in a month after there had been no pharmacy robberies since November 2013, and the same Rite Aid was robbed again in February 2015. Rudger Ellis, 21, of Gardiner was arrested and charged in that case.
Michael Shepherd — 370-7652
Twitter: @mikeshepherdme
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