Robert “Paco” Payzant, Jr. Courtesy of the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition
Bobby Payzant was serving an 18-year sentence at the Maine State Prison when another inmate and friend, dying of cancer, was moved to hospice care.
“The way they just really cared for Frank in every aspect,” Payzant recalled during a 2014 radio interview. “It really touched my heart, and it immediately felt like something I could do.”
Impressed with the compassion he observed in a place where he and other incarcerated people are often deprived of their dignity, Payzant wanted to be involved. He joined the volunteer prison hospice program a year later. After his release, Payzant made it his life’s work to ensure the humane treatment of all people behind bars.
Robert “Paco” Payzant Jr., 55, died in a car crash on U.S. Route 1 in Woolwich on Friday afternoon. He was driving south when he veered into the opposite lane, witnesses told the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, and crashed into an oncoming pickup truck.
The truck’s driver, 69-year-old Joseph Pickul, was still hospitalized Monday morning Sheriff Joel Merry said. Attempts to contact Pickul were unsuccessful Monday.
Payzant’s death came as a shock to friends and family, who were reconciling Monday his unexpected death with the decades he spent incarcerated and the freedom he enjoyed for the last couple of years.
Payzant was born in Brunswick and was a lifelong Mainer, said his father, Robert Payzant Sr. The younger Payzant was 4 years old when his mother left Maine to live closer to her family in California. Learning to play the guitar in prison, Payzant would later write a song about the loss, “Abandoned Son,” which friends shared across Facebook on Monday.
He was a big guy, Payzant’s father said, who filled doorways with his presence and rooms with his charisma.
“Every time he walked into a room, it just lit up,” Payzant said. “I’ve never seen anybody with the charisma he had.”
Rober Payzant was always candid about the actions that put him in prison, friends say.
During the 2014 radio interview with Safe Space, a local show hosted by a Portland psychiatrist, Payzant said he grew up in the criminal justice system, having been charged with burglary and sentenced as an adult when he was 16.
When Payzant got out of prison in 2005 in his late 30s, he was released to a home where he was surrounded by substance use. Payzant said he became a “late-stage addict.”
Payzant returned to prison in 2007 after he was convicted of burglary and aggravated assault for punching a man at an L.L. Bean employee parking lot in 2005 and stealing his wallet. Payzant was arrested a few days later for a different offense – leading police on a high-speed chase while driving a stolen vehicle, which he ultimately crashed.
Payzant said addressing his reality was an important part of moving forward, just like addressing pain is an important step toward healing in hospice. But he also stressed his hope that people would see him, and others who have been incarcerated, for more than the actions that put them behind bars.
“I don’t want the actions of my past to dictate how I’m perceived for the rest of my life,” Payzant said. “I want the things that I do today to weigh in on that, and I don’t feel like if I continue my life in prison that really happens in an adequate manner.”
Kandyce Powell, who worked with Payzant in hospice care, said Monday he was one of the “most vulnerable people I’ve ever met.” Powell helped bring hospice care to Maine prisons in 2000 and launched the volunteer program for Maine prisoners seven years later. Payzant was one of her earliest inductees.
“He loved to help other people,” Powell said. “He was a huge defender of people with disabilities, varying abilities, people who were vulnerable themselves.”
When it was time for Payzant’s release in 2020, Powell invited him to stay at her home. He quickly found himself in advocacy work, joining the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition as a coordinator and helping with its push last year to end solitary confinement in Maine.
SOLITARY STATEMENT
Payzant was one of several formerly incarcerated Mainers to testify before state lawmakers last year, asking them to outlaw solitary confinement in state prisons. Ultimately, lawmakers did not agree.
Payzant’s description of his own time in solitary confinement offered a stark contrast to the compassion and dignity he witnessed in his hospice work.
“I remember the attitude of indifference from the guards, having to ask again and again for something as simple as toilet paper before finally receiving it, usually hours later,” Payzant testified. “I remember the noise, how it reverberated throughout the entire unit as other men in solitary succumbed to the madness they were driven to because of untreated mental health issues. I also remember the absolute silence where the only company that I had was my thoughts, my fears, my anguish.”
The Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office is still investigating what led to the crash, but does not believe Payzant was speeding, nor do they believe alcohol was involved. Merry said Monday that investigators are waiting on an autopsy report to determine if there were any medical conditions that led to the crash. Because neither vehicle had a passenger, Merry said it will be difficult to determine if distracted driving was at play.
“We’d like to have answers soon,” Merry said. However, the autopsy report could take several weeks.
A fundraising page on GoFundMe for Payzant’s funeral and an upcoming celebration of life had raised more than $6,000 as of Monday night. The page, organized by the Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, remembers Payzant as a “pillar in our community” who “brought his love for people and commitment to humanity everywhere he went.”
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