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Government transparency advocates say the state went too far in redacting an investigator’s report on a fatal March 2025 house fire on Bailey Island, withholding details that are typically disclosed after an investigation has concluded.
Portland attorney Sigmund Schutz and New England First Amendment Coalition Executive Director Justin Silverman both criticized the redactions, saying they didn’t appear to be legally justified. After receiving pushback from Schutz, the state issued a revised version of the investigator’s report in late April with some of the original redactions lifted.
“The redactions were overly aggressive, particularly for a closed investigation,” Schutz said in an email. “That is increasingly common, with agencies erring on the side of excessive redactions rather than on the side of transparency. In this instance, large narrative sections were removed wholesale, and they obscured basic facts.”
One of the fire victim’s sons also criticized the state’s sparse communication with family members, saying the lack of information deprived them of closure.
The Maine State Fire Marshal’s Office investigated the fire, which occurred overnight on March 8-9 at a house at 9 Sea Mist Lane. Investigators found the body of 71-year-old Joseph J. Meuse Jr., of Topsham, inside the burned residence. The Fire Marshal’s Office later classified the fire’s cause as undetermined, citing extensive damage to the home.
Meuse was a retired postal official, a father of three and grandfather of four, and a guitarist who had a passion for politics and the arts, according to his obituary.
The Harpswell Anchor filed a Freedom of Access Act request for the investigator’s report in November. The Fire Marshal’s Office responded in January, releasing a version of the report with lengthy redactions, including several fully blacked-out paragraphs.
In all, nine of the report’s 16 paragraphs were totally redacted, making it virtually impossible to follow the fire investigator’s narrative. A state paralegal defended the redactions in a written response to the Anchor, saying there was a “reasonable possibility” that releasing more information would “constitute an invasion of privacy.”
The revised version of the report contains fewer redactions, with only three paragraphs fully blacked out. Silverman said the revisions were an improvement, but he still struggled to understand how they could be legally justified.
“I don’t know what is underneath those redactions, but I can’t foresee a situation in which the privacy interests of the deceased or the family members would be implicated here, particularly of the deceased,” he said in an interview. “There’s very strong legal authority that the deceased don’t have privacy rights, so unless … the state is claiming another exemption, I just don’t see how that would apply here.”
Both versions redact Meuse’s identity and any information that could be used to identify him — even though the agency had already publicly identified him. They also redact the identity of property owners David and Florette Braun — information the investigator said he pulled from a public record available to anyone online.
Findings unclear
The revised report provides more detail about the Fire Marshal’s Office investigation, but it still leaves questions unanswered about how the fire started and the circumstances of Meuse’s death.
According to the report, the house was a seasonal residence that firefighters had believed to be unoccupied since the previous fall. Benjamin Wallace Jr., chief of the Orr’s and Bailey Islands Fire Department, told investigator Kenneth Tabor that firefighters didn’t have any clear indication of what may have started the fire.
Tabor reported heavy fire damage to the front of the structure. The fire had consumed nearly all of the exterior wall, as well as the adjacent floor inside the home. He noted a hole burned through the floor, extending about 8 feet toward the living space along the length of the wall, with nearby ceiling and roof materials similarly consumed.
The report also describes steps investigators took to identify people connected to the property, including checking town tax records and vehicle registration information for a car parked in the garage. Investigators attempted to contact the property owner and others who may have had information about the home.
Some of those details remain partly redacted, making the sequence difficult to follow. The report refers to a video recorded at 9:45 p.m. on March 8, the night before investigators responded, but redactions obscure key details about what the video showed.
Another key detail mentioned is that someone, presumably the homeowner, told the investigator he had rented out the house. Property records list the homeowners as the Brauns, of Jupiter, Florida. The Brauns could not be reached for comment.
The report says investigators initially believed the fire might have involved a fatality because they could not account for someone’s whereabouts. Firefighters later returned to the house to extinguish smoldering debris. Fire Marshal’s Office investigators and Maine State Fire Marshal Shawn Esler then searched for human remains.
Esler spotted Meuse’s body near a doorway leading from an exterior deck, according to the report, and the body was taken to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Augusta.
That office later determined that Meuse died from smoke inhalation and thermal injury, while the manner of death was undetermined, according to a spokesperson for the office.
Investigators used a fire investigation dog to check the room where the body was found for ignitable liquids, but the dog did not indicate their presence, according to the report.
The Fire Marshal’s Office ultimately classified the fire’s cause as undetermined. The report says investigators couldn’t narrow the area of origin beyond somewhere along the front side of the house. Without a more specific origin point, the report says, the cause could not be determined.
Investigators considered possible causes including electrical components, an intentional act, unsafe use of candles, and appliance malfunction or failure. None could be eliminated because of the extent of the damage, the report says.
‘No closure’ for family
Joseph Meuse’s eldest son, Michael Meuse, said in an interview that the family has been frustrated by what he described as a lack of communication and follow-up from state officials regarding his father’s death.
Michael Meuse said that despite multiple requests, the Fire Marshal’s Office never shared the investigator’s report with the family. He said they received a copy only after the Harpswell Anchor obtained the report through a public records request and provided it to them.
“They (the state) were not very supportive of us, especially given what had taken place,” Michael Meuse said. “They basically just told us, ‘You need to wait; there’s an investigation going on.'”
Fifteen months later, the family was still waiting for information about Joseph Meuse’s death, he said.
“The fire marshal wouldn’t take my phone calls. Nobody would speak to us,” Michael Meuse said. “We received nothing. … We had no closure.”
Michael Meuse said another source of frustration for the family has been the way fire officials and some local news reporting seemed to suggest that Joseph Meuse’s presence in the rental home was mysterious or unexplained.
Michael Meuse said the family knew his father was renting the Bailey Island home and had visited him there multiple times. Joseph Meuse began staying there about two weeks before the fatal fire broke out, according to his sons.
“It seems that everybody is running with the narrative that he shouldn’t have been there, and that he was like a squatter or something,” Michael Meuse said. “That isn’t true. … He knew (the homeowners) and was renting from them.”
The Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a request for comment on expert assessments of the report’s redactions, or whether it followed procedure for sharing information with the victim’s family.
Withholding pattern
Schutz and Silverman said the Bailey Island fire report reflects a broader problem with public agencies withholding too much information, often by citing privacy concerns that don’t justify the scope of the redactions.
The Fire Marshal’s Office ultimately released a more complete version of the report after Schutz wrote to the state on the Anchor’s behalf. But Schutz said that kind of exchange is part of the problem: Requesters often have to challenge redactions before agencies will release information that should have been public in the first place.
“It is not unusual for public agencies to take an overly cautious approach to responding to requests for investigative information, and to review and release more information when pressed,” Schutz said. “The iterative process — a back and forth between the requester and agency over objections or redactions — is not atypical. What is unusual is the extent to which the agency erred on the side of excessive secrecy and then had to substantially walk that back.”
Silverman said the same practical problem affects news organizations and members of the public across Maine and beyond. Even when a requester believes records have been improperly withheld, litigation is often too expensive and time-consuming to pursue.
“News organizations and other individuals and parties walk away because they don’t have the resources or the time or the money to pursue litigation, and that’s really unfortunate,” Silverman said. “There should be another way.”
Silverman said the organization he leads, the Massachusetts-based New England First Amendment Coalition, has begun trying to address that gap through a legal fund supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Silverman’s group announced in April that the fund is helping to support a public records lawsuit by the Maine Trust for Local News and WMTW over heavily redacted police records related to a 2024 double homicide in Bath. The coalition said the lawsuit raises similar questions about whether agencies are improperly citing the privacy rights of dead people or their families to withhold records of strong public interest.
In the Bath case, the news organizations are seeking records that could show how police handled earlier domestic violence calls they received before mother and daughter Lisa and Jennifer Bailey were killed by husband and father Michael Bailey, who then killed himself.
Their legal complaint argues that Maine law treats privacy rights as personal rights that end at death and cannot be asserted by relatives or other third parties.
Silverman said the Bailey Island fire report raises similar concerns, even though the Anchor has not sued the state. He said excessive redactions prevent the public from understanding how government agencies investigate deaths and whether their conclusions are supported by the facts.
Schutz said fire investigation reports involving a death are precisely the type of records the public has a strong interest in understanding.
“Transparency builds confidence that the investigation was thorough, fair and accountable, while excessive secrecy undermines public trust,” Schutz said. “Without disclosure of the factual basis for the agency’s conclusions, the public cannot meaningfully evaluate whether those conclusions are justified or serve as an effective check on the agency’s decision-making.”
