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FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE |
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MY TWENTY-FOUR YEAR OLD SON, MIKE |
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ONE MOTHER'S FIGHT FOR JUSTICE |
The information below is
excerpted from an article by Robert Conlin
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Four fire-related deaths arson deaths at
two scenes in the span of six hours in a relatively crime-free area in the middle of winter; no
doubt area law enforcement were caught off guard and on their heels.
To compound their case load, there was
a major pot bust in the
nearby town
of Holden by Maine DEA agents the
same night.
On paper, it
would have appeared to have been
unrelated, but
as names connected to
the Lucerne fire and the Holden
bust
emerged, a possible connection did
as well.
One of the men arrested was a
serial drug trafficker named
Percy
Sargent. A subsequent news article
by an
investigative reporter for
Bangor Daily News
suggested
that word on the street was that the
Lucerne fire was a
retaliation for
Sargent’s belief that either
Cochran
or the
cottage owner’s stepson, another drug dealer
named
David
Dupray, ratted on him.
One of the
other names that eventually emerged
was Paul Pollard.
Originally
from Readfield, Maine, he was a
short, stubby 21-year-old
college
student in the city of Worcester,
Massachusetts.
He was
also a half-brother of Lionel
Cormier, one of Maine’s
most
notorious violent criminals at the
time.
A suspect in the murder of
Michael Cochran in 1981, Paul
Pollard is now a paralegal
living in Southern California.
He was never charged with a crime by
Maine law enforcement,
despite
being linked to a number of
felonies.
Sargent, it was alleged, had solicited
Cormier and Pollard
to settle the
score with the perceived rat.
Cochran,
who obviously needed a low
visibility place to hide out from
all the law enforcement looking for
him, was in the wrong
place at the
wrong time.
Sargent subsequently denied that in
conversations from jail
with Leola
Cochran and pointed the finger
squarely at Pollard
and Cormier,
claiming that Pollard was high on
cocaine and
paranoid that Michael
Cochran was a rat, so he shot him,
poured gasoline around the cabin,
and lit it.
But it turns out he wasn’t the
rat. Instead, it was a Maine
DEA
informant named Percy Cote. Cote had
been arrested
along with Sargent in
the bust the night of the fire in
Holden,
and then again the
following night in a major bust in
Presque Isle,170 miles to the north
of Bangor. That one resulted in 21
arrests.
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Copyright© 2026
by Leola Cochran. All
Rights Reserved.
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