AUGUSTA — Guerrette father and son, in matching white polo shirts with green logos, surveyed painters atop scaffolding rolling swaths of gray on the new walls of an apartment overlooking the Kennebec River.

The Riverview Terrace apartment was a two-day job for Wow 1 Day Painting, owned equally by William G. Guerrette Jr. and son Ryan Guerrette, both of Pittston.

On Thursday they talked of how operating this franchise has brought the men closer and helped to heal wounds the Guerrette family suffered in a nightmare that began seven years ago.

Six months after the November 2007 theft of a safe from the Guerrette home, two intruders armed with a machete and bent on vengeance after one them had been accused of the theft, broke in late one night, terrorizing the five Guerrettes inside, maiming William Guerrette Sr. and leaving 10-year-old Nicole “Nikki” Guerrette with a traumatic head injury.

Today William Guerrette, 55, who fought one of the intruders, still bears the visible scars. There’s no disguising his missing finger, but his hair now covers the scars on his head.

Nikki is 17 now and a senior at a charter school in North Salt Lake, Utah. William Guerrette’s wife, Melanie, stays in Utah during the school year; mother and daughter fly home to Maine for holidays and summers.

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“I was only 17, 18 when that happened, and it takes a lot to get over that. It’s my dad and my sister,” said Ryan Guerrette, who managed to escape from the house uninjured. “I dealt a long time with blaming myself.”

He had been friends with Daniel Fortune, the home invader who earlier had stolen the safe. Fortune is serving a life sentence for the attack. His accomplice, Leo Hylton, is serving a 50-year sentence.

After high school, Ryan Guerrette, now 25, went on to learn the construction skills that allow him to be the working half of the partnership. “Starting this now allows me to make a name for myself in business,” he said.

 


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