A 17-year-old boy has been arrested in connection with the mysterious killing of a paddleboarder in Maine earlier this month, police said on Thursday.
The Maine State Police said in a press release that the teenager, whose name was not disclosed, was arrested without incident at approximately 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday in connection with the homicide investigation of 48-year-old Sunshine Stewart.
The teenager was taken into the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland. It is not immediately clear if he has retained an attorney or what charges the 17-year-old faces.
The arrest comes two weeks after Stewart was found dead in Union, roughly 30 miles east of Augusta, by authorities responding to a report of a missing paddleboarder, state police said.
The Office of Chief Medical Examiner in Augusta determined Stewart’s cause of death was strangulation and blunt force trauma, police said. The death was deemed a homicide, though details about how she died have yet to be released.
“This remains … an active and ongoing investigation. No additional information is being released at this time,” state police said in the Thursday statement.
Authorities previously stated that the owners of a nearby campground were cooperative during the investigation. They also asked for information from anyone who saw Stewart paddleboarding between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. on July 2 near an island in Crawford Pond.
“I grew up in Union, and as far as I know, nothing like this has ever happened there,” Kimberly Hamill, a longtime friend of Stewart, previously told NBC News. “For it to have happened to Sunshine is like, how could that even be? It just makes it feel like nothing will be right again ever.”
Hamill said Stewart was a carpenter who owned a construction business and a boat captain who had previously sailed to the Virgin Islands. Stewart did not graduate from high school, but managed to earn a degree in marine biology, Hamill said.
“I want people to remember her as the force of nature that she was,” Hamill said. “She was such a loyal, good person. That was her most memorable quality — how much she believed in everybody.”
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