The call came in around 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning, reporting a canoe had capsized on Papoose Pond in Waterford.

Pedro Quizhpi had gone under.

When Oxford County Sheriff’s Deputy Dennis Lowe arrived on the scene, he noticed the blue canoe floating less than 100 feet from the shore and several emergency responders trying to revive a man at the water’s edge. Quizhpi, 50, originally from Ecuador, was pronounced dead within the hour.

His brother, standing nearby, told Lowe they were from Queens in New York City and were working in Scarborough. Lowe wrote in a report that the brother told him they were in Waterford, “spending a few days away to relax” with more than a dozen other men.

Records from the Maine Warden Service confirm Quizhpi’s drowning on June 14 was an accident. But Lowe’s suspicions that the men were in the U.S. illegally prompted a statewide alert and, eventually, the arrest of 14 men, including Quizhpi’s brother, by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The Press Herald obtained reports from other agencies in which their officers question Oxford County’s approach, and whether the sheriff’s office broke its own guidelines about not participating in immigration enforcement.

The encounter underscores the debate playing out in Maine and many others states about whether, and how, local law enforcement should coordinate with federal immigration authorities. Many departments have said it’s not their role to hold anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Others, like Oxford, have said they don’t have a specific policy to guide their interactions.

Lowe doesn’t explain in his report why he called Border Patrol; his report simply states that he had “questions regarding the residency” of the men, at least one of whom he indicated was Hispanic.

Oxford County Sheriff’s Office Major Dana Thompson said the multi-agency response that day was a testament to the seriousness of the investigation. He said in a statement Thursday that a group of eight men had “fled the scene before providing proper identification or any statements to the investigators … (hindering) the deputies’ investigation, further complicating the case and casting some concern on what may have occurred.”

He said he hadn’t seen any of the other agencies’ police reports and couldn’t speak to whether their investigation had been questioned.

“I would like to think that any law enforcement agency that receives a teletype ‘BOLO’ (be on the lookout) for a van full of people who fled and left a death scene would understand that there is certainly enough reason to conduct a brief investigatory traffic stop and identify the occupants therein,” Thompson wrote.

But it’s not clear that those men were even there when Quizhpi died. A game warden who spoke to them before they were arrested said in his report that they had left Waterford before the canoe capsized.

The Press Herald was unable to verify any of the names of the men arrested or their immigration status. Their identifying information was redacted from police reports obtained via public records requests.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine is worried that these arrests could discourage people from calling for help when they’re having an emergency.

“I think that when people feel they cannot trust local law enforcement, when they feel that any contact with local local law enforcement might end up with them in federal immigration custody, that makes everyone less safe,” said Anahita Sotoohi, an attorney with the ACLU of Maine.

SCARBOROUGH STOP

Lowe had put out a statewide alert around 10 a.m. asking police to stop two vehicles that the Waterford fire chief said had seen leaving the scene that morning.

“I informed the Chief that Border Patrol was responding to the scene due to questions regarding the residency of some of the individuals involved on scene,” Lowe wrote. “The Chief then stated, ‘Well, some of them already left in a gray truck with (redacted) on the side, as well as a blue van and a white van with ladders on top.'”

Lowe suspected the trucks were headed for Scarborough, where Quizhpi’s brother said the group was staying at an address on Route 1. He asked dispatchers to issue a statewide alert “to stop and hold the vehicles due to multiple witnesses to the death being inside the vehicle and I needed to speak with them.”

Scarborough police said the alert listed both Lowe and Border Patrol as contacts. They responded to the Route 1 address but didn’t see either of the trucks in the parking lot. They ran a records check on three other cars, including a blue van that Lowe told one officer he was also interested in.

When the van pulled out of the parking lot, Scarborough police immediately stopped it. The eight men inside didn’t speak English but were able to provide identification, according to Scarborough police reports.

Still, officers held the group on the side of the road for an hour and a half while calling Lowe several times for updates and clarification. An officer also called Border Patrol for help translating at one point, according to their incident reports.

Scarborough Officer Shawn Anastasoff eventually started to doubt whether there was even enough probable cause for the detention.

“As the situation developed, it became clear that there was confusion regarding who the detention was for,” Anastasoff wrote in his report, adding that it was against the department’s policy to hold people based only on their immigration status.

Soon, the Scarborough officers were getting calls from the warden service, which also wanted to speak with the men, Anastasoff wrote. So they held the group even longer. Only when a warden was minutes away did officers tell the group they were free to leave.

It was too late.

Scarborough Officer Taylor Owen wrote in her report that as she was leaving the scene she “could see the warden going to approach the (blue van) as it had not yet pulled out.”

Records show a Border Patrol agent arrived minutes later.

Scarborough police Chief Mark Holmquist believes his officers complied with the department’s policy and “acted in good faith” by releasing the men after determining they “lacked the authority to further detain the potential witnesses to the suspicious death.”

But Sotoohi, from the ACLU of Maine, suggested the officers should have released the men much sooner.

“Once a law enforcement agency realizes that they don’t have authority to hold someone, then that person should be released immediately with absolutely no waiting period,” she said.

THE GAME WARDENS

When Warden Chuck Sawyer arrived in Scarborough as the local police cleared the scene, a crowd of people had formed at a nearby restaurant, Cafe Luna, and were recording the incident.

Sawyer wrote in his incident report that a few Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office deputies who were on duty in the area helped shield the warden from the crowd.

A number of people outside Cafe Luna later contacted the ACLU of Maine, Sotoohi said, prompting their own records request for police reports about the incident.

“People reached out to us and were concerned about what happened but didn’t really know what had exactly happened,” Sotoohi said. “It’s very hard to observe a traffic stop just from the side of the road.”

Sawyer identified only seven men in the van. He said his interview with the group was brief. They told him they had been with Quizhpi and his brother but had left early because they said they needed to be back in Scarborough that day.

He ran a background check on their names, and “no immediate flags were uncovered.”

The stop was just long enough for Border Patrol to arrive and take all seven men into custody. “They did not elaborate as to why,” Sawyer wrote.

THE INTERVIEW

Border Patrol had already arrested the six other men in Waterford that morning, according to game warden reports, after helping translate interviews the wardens needed for their own investigation.

One of those wardens, Kyle Hladik, wrote in a report that he spoke with a man who had been in Quizhpi’s canoe. They were drinking beer and weren’t wearing their life vests, the man said.

Another man “said he did not know what happened, they just flipped, and he … went into shock,” Hladik wrote. “He did not know if (Quizhpi) struggled or tried to swim.”

Other men who had watched the canoe flip over tried to help Quizhpi, the men said according to Hladik’s report. One person ran around the neighborhood, knocking on a woman’s door and asking her to call for an ambulance.

They tried to perform CPR as they waited about half an hour for help to arrive, Hladik wrote.

Once Hladik had determined from those interviews, and conversations with other witnesses, that this was an accidental drowning, he arranged for Border Patrol to give one of the men their phones back, so he could call Quizhpi’s family and tell them about his death.

Border Patrol then arrested the six men.

Lowe, the Oxford County deputy, wrote in his report that Border Patrol took them into custody for “being in-country illegally.” They had to release one man after confirming he was allowed to be in the U.S. The sheriff’s office helped transport them to the jail, where a van eventually took them to the Border Patrol station in Rangeley.

It’s unclear what happened to them after that.

A spokesperson for Border Patrol did not respond to emailed questions about the arrests.