Collette Boure, the 17-year-old from Standish who ran away from home with her boyfriend in October, died Monday night at a Texas hospital from injuries suffered in a car crash after a police chase in Oklahoma.

Her boyfriend, Alexander Meyers, 17, of Portland, who was driving the car when it crashed, is expected to be charged with second-degree murder in the death, Oklahoma authorities said.

The death was confirmed Tuesday morning by a relative of Boure.

“She will be an organ donor,” said Stacey Grindel, Boure’s stepmother.

Mark Matloff, the district attorney for the Oklahoma counties in which the chase and crash took place, said Meyers was held overnight in juvenile detention, and had been charged as a juvenile with felony eluding.

But now that Boure has died, Matloff said he will petition the court to change Meyers’ status to a separate category – juvenile offender – and to charge him with second-degree murder. Changing his offender status means Meyers could be sentenced to 10 years to life in prison if he is convicted.

Advertisement

Matloff said he expects the case to be expedited because Meyers will be tried in the juvenile justice system, which is a more streamlined process than the adult courts.

Jonna Boure of Fort Fairfield, Collette’s aunt, said Tuesday that her sister – the girl’s mother, Madeline Boure – is distraught over the death, which came after years of legal sparring over custody of Collette, who lived at different times with different relatives.

Jonna Boure said her sister has had persistent mental health issues that complicated her ability to care for her daughter, triggering the custody dispute, but that at no time did anyone stop looking for ways to support Collette.

“(Collette) was very loved,” Jonna Boure said. “She wasn’t estranged. She was kept away in some ways. I want people to know that she was loved, and that we did care a lot about her, and we reached out to her when we could.”

Collette Boure was first reported missing from Maine on Oct. 13, and Meyers was reported missing Oct. 21.

They had been dating for about a year and were believed to be in southern Maine traveling in a car that belonged to a relative.

Advertisement

No one in either family knew that Boure and Meyers had left the state until they received word Monday morning from police that the teenagers had been involved in a high-speed chase in southeast Oklahoma near the Texas border.

Police said the teens were traveling west on State Route 70 through Idabel, Oklahoma, when a local police officer tried to stop them for speeding. Instead of pulling over the driver accelerated, leading police on a 40-mile chase with speeds exceeding 100 mph.

Officers in the nearby town of Hugo were waiting for the teens, and when the car approached, the driver took some type of evasive maneuver that led to the crash, according to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, which is investigating the accident.

Although Meyers, who was driving, escaped unharmed, Boure suffered massive injuries and was flown by helicopter to Christus St. Michael’s Hospital in Texarkana, Texas.

A call to Meyers’ mother, Jennifer, was not returned Tuesday morning. She had previously declined to comment Monday, before Boure’s death.

Stacy Lary, Boure’s paternal grandmother, said neither Meyers nor her granddaughter had a driver’s license.

Advertisement

Lary said she helped raise Boure, especially during the years when Michael Grindel – Lary’s son and Boure’s father – was finishing college.

After Grindel graduated and got an apartment, he took custody of Boure again. Boure’s mother had been estranged from her daughter for years, family members said.

When Grindel got married and had more children, Lary said, Collete struggled to adapt, despite the best efforts of her father and stepmother.

“Collette being a teenager would test the boundaries, and that’s where some of the issues came in,” Lary said.

It was the usual teenage problems, Lary said – “not doing things that she’s supposed to be doing, not being where she was supposed to be, taking off and not telling anyone where she would be.”

Stacey Grindel said she and her husband worked hard to love Boure and help her through some of her problems.

Advertisement

“As a stepparent, you love them like they’re your own,” she said. “I hope she knows that. My family loved her like she was my biological child.”

As she grew up, Boure became more rebellious, Lary said. Some of the discipline issues accelerated when Boure met Meyers last year, and Boure asked to live with her mother in Windham, where she thought she would be freer from parental rules, Lary said.

Boure had recently gotten in trouble after she and Meyers, a lobsterman, were caught by the Maine Marine Patrol trying to steal a boat so Meyers could fish his lobster traps, Lary said.

In a deal with the courts that kept Boure from house arrest, Lary helped place her in a program in Lewiston for troubled teens, and had been hoping to get her into a program that teaches teenagers to become independent so that she could move out on her own, but Boure rejected that idea, Lary said.

A short time later, Boure ran away with Meyers, she said.

“She was just bright and funny and beautiful, and broken,” Lary said. “I think she was angry at the whole world.”

 


Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.

Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.