A woman was found dead in her cell Sunday morning at the York County Jail in Alfred, according to Sheriff William King Jr.
Nicole Turner, 34, of Biddeford was discovered dead at 6:30 a.m., King wrote in an email. She had been in jail since June 21 on “miscellaneous charges,” King said without elaborating.
“The Maine State Police Major Crimes Unit is investigating the death and no further details will be released at this time,” the sheriff wrote Sunday afternoon. King did not respond to multiple calls from the Portland Press Herald.
A spokesperson for the state police did not respond to inquiries Sunday evening regarding the cause of Turner’s death.
Turner’s is the first known death to have occurred at the York County Jail since 2020, when Jason Daigle, a 47-year-old man charged with “unlawful trafficking of a scheduled drug,” died from a medical emergency after he was diagnosed with COVID-19. The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention announced that COVID-19 was a contributing factor in his death a month later.
In December 2019, York County Jail employees found Kimberly Pierce unresponsive shortly after the first day of her two-month sentence. Pierce, a 35-year-old mother from Waterboro, was serving time for driving-related offenses.
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