AUBURN — A Lisbon man will serve nine years in prison for aggravated attempted murder of a local police officer in connection with a high-speed chase two years ago.

Bartolo Ford, 49, was sentenced in Androscoggin County Superior Court to 20 years in prison with all but nine years suspended, plus six years probation. He was also sentenced on six other counts related to the incident, including aggravated criminal mischief, reckless conduct, eluding an officer and theft by unauthorized taking. He was sentenced to between six months and two years in jail for each of those crimes, all to be served concurrently with the longer prison sentence.

The Sept. 15, 2008 incident began when a local police officer stopped Ford in a parking lot on Minot Avenue and began questioning him about the allegedly stolen concrete items in the dump truck he was driving. Ford sped away. That officer pursued Ford until he got a flat tire from the shattered concrete left in the roadway by one of the stolen concrete cylinders. A second officer, Cpl. Kristopher Bouchard, took up the chase. Ford rammed Bouchard’s cruiser by backing into his front. Bouchard fired four shots through the door of the truck, hitting Ford in the hip.

Ford fled again, eventually ramming officer Matthew Johnson’s cruiser head-on farther down the road in Poland, near the Poland Spring bottling plant.

At the intersection of Routes 26 and 121, Deputy Chief Jason Moen took up the chase in an unmarked cruiser. When he switched on his flashing blue lights, Ford stopped and chased Moen’s car, then fled to a dead-end road. He abandoned his truck in a stream and fled on foot into the woods. He surrendered later to a Maine State Police trooper on Route 26.

A Gulf War veteran, Ford said he was suffering a post-traumatic stress disorder flashback at the time of the incident, complicated by a recent change in his prescription medication and by the sleeping drug Ambien. He said he didn’t remember the incident.