Maine State Police detectives escort Assistant Attorney General Meg Elam along a blood trail from a shooting and stabbing that occurred in the early hours of Saturday in Gardiner. Kennebec Journal photo by Andy Molloy

GARDINER —  A 21-year-old man has been arrested and charged in connection with a stabbing and shooting that injured two men in the city early Saturday morning, police said.

The two men were found outside of a home on Lincoln Avenue at around 1 a.m. on Saturday. A resident on the street had called Gardiner police after one of the men came to the door and asked for help, according Steve McCausland, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety.

Dylan Ketcham

Dylan Ketcham of Gardiner was charged with elevated aggravated assault on Saturday afternoon and was being held at the Kennebec County Jail, according to McCausland.

Ketcham’s bail was set at $150,000.

Dylan Ketcham, right, talks to Maine State Police detectives Saturday near the scene on Lincoln Avenue in Gardiner where one man was discovered shot and another stabbed shortly after 1 a.m. Ketcham was later arrested and charged with elevated aggravated assault. Kennebec Journal photo by Andy Molloy

Gardiner police and emergency services were dispatched to the home, where they found one man shot and another stabbed. Both men were taken by ambulance to MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta, but were later flown by LifeFlight helicopter to Maine Medical Center in Portland to undergo emergency surgery.

Ketcham was tracked down by a Maine State Police canine in an abandoned building about a half-mile away from where the injured men were found on Lincoln Avenue, police said.

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The identities of the two victims are being withheld tonight as police continue to monitor their conditions, according to McCausland.

Evidence of a confrontation was splattered over the scene on Saturday afternoon. A trail of blood led from behind 156 Lincoln Ave., a family home in a residential neighborhood, up to the front door. Police were at the house, and sand had been spread over the bloody snow.

Maine State Police detectives on Saturday brief Assistant Attorney General Meg Elam on a shooting and stabbing that occurred in the early hours of Saturday in Gardiner. The two male victims, both in their 20s, are undergoing emergency surgery in Portland while a suspect was apprehended by a tracking dog nearby, according to state police. Kennebec Journal photo by Andy Molloy

A man who answered the door at the house on Saturday said the noise from the confrontation was very different from the kids’ squabbles he normally hears from the children’s athletic fields across the street.

“This was not just an argument,” said the man, who declined to give his name.

Gardiner police on Saturday afternoon said there did not appear to be any danger to neighbors.

“There is no threat to the public,” Detective Sgt. Todd Pilsbury told a reporter via text message.

 

Kennebec Journal photographer Andy Molloy contributed reporting. 

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