BRIDGTON – A 9-year-old girl managed to escape the clutches of a man attempting to abduct her from a swimming hole along Steven’s Brook in Bridgton Saturday afternoon.

According to Bridgton Police Chief Kevin Schofield, at about 2:30 p.m., a white-haired overweight man driving a white panel van that may have had a handmade cardboard sign with the words “Ice Cream,” approached a group of children playing in the brook near the intersection of Kansas Road and Smith Avenue in downtown Bridgton.

The man had his hands on one of the girls, Schofield said, before she managed to break free and run away with the other children to one of their homes, where the girl called her father who then dialed police.

The attempted kidnapping in broad daylight is an anomaly in the quiet town with no other attempted kidnappings in Bridgton in recent memory, Schofield said. He said police have developed a person of interest in the case and have received “good leads” from both the multiple witnesses at the scene and from the public in the days after the incident, but are looking to the public for more tips on the incident.

“Obviously the seriousness of the case and the investigation, we’ve been working on it almost exclusively and we have developed a person of interest, not necessarily a suspect, that we’d like to talk to … that may have information that might be helpful to us,” Schofield said.

Schofield declined to comment on the emotional state of the girl. He also clarified that the white panel van with makeshift sign was not a licensed ice cream vendor.

“The van was described as a white panel van with a resemblance of an ice cream truck,” he said. “But I want to be clear it wasn’t an advertised ice cream vendor.”

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