It has been more than a week since state police arrested a 39-year-old Sidney woman in connection with the death of a 14-year-old in Sidney.

And while the woman, Megan McDonald, was identified by police hours after her arrest Dec. 20 and has since appeared in an Augusta courtroom, the identity of the teenage boy continues to be withheld by prosecutors and is not in court records.

The attorney general’s office, which prosecutes all homicides in Maine, said it is not releasing the name or listing it in formal charging documents due to recent feedback about privacy concerns for families of alleged victims.

But opinions of legal experts are split. While some said the state is within its rights, others said that decision is unusual, and that transparency should outweigh privacy in a case like this, especially when many community members say they know the teenage boy’s name.

“The privacy of a victim’s family is very important especially when the loved one lost is a minor,” wrote Danna Hayes, special assistant to Attorney General Aaron M. Frey, in an email Monday. “We have recently received feedback recommending that we not release the name of minor victims and not use their name in our charging instruments.”

“After consulting with the family based on this feedback,” Hayes continued, “we have decided that we will not release the name of the minor victim.”

Hayes clarified, in response to a follow-up question, that the “feedback” has “come up in a number of contexts, including with other prosecutors at the (district attorney) level who do not release this information as well as families of victims.”

Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, an advocacy group that works on public access, government transparency and First Amendment issues, said that privacy concerns do not seem to outweigh public interest in this case.

“As a general matter, those who are deceased don’t have as strong privacy rights, if any, as victims that are still alive,” Silverman said Tuesday.

“Typically, the names of murder victims are released, even if they are minors,” he continued. “Which isn’t to say that there may not be some strong privacy interests on behalf of the family, but I think the attorney general’s office, in this case, given the circumstances and high public interest in this case, being a homicide, should be explaining to everyone why this particular case warrants such secrecy.

“If there are any unique considerations, those should be shared so we can understand why secrecy might be warranted in this case.”

RECORDS SEALED

While it is not uncommon for police and prosecutors to keep information about a case from the public before it heads to a grand jury for indictment and, eventually, moves toward a trial, authorities typically release basic information.

Maine State Police said they arrested McDonald on Dec. 20. Investigators were seen throughout the day working at 2005 Summerhaven Road in Sidney.

State police said a woman reported to the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office in Auburn early that morning that an incident had taken place at her residence on Summerhaven Road in the Kennebec County town of Sidney. A dispatch log later obtained under Maine’s Freedom of Access Act shows the woman was Megan K. McDonald and the incident reported was a murder.

That prompted a wellbeing check from Kennebec County sheriff’s deputies, who found the body of the 14-year-old boy. The Office of Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide, caused by a combination of asphyxiation, manual strangulation, and sharp force injury, state police said.

McDonald, who records indicate worked as a nurse and served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003-10, has since been held in custody. At her initial appearance in court, delayed several days at the agreement of both prosecutors and her attorneys, a judge ordered her to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. She is being held without bail.

Some court records in the case were still impounded — not available to the public — at the Capital Judicial Center as of Tuesday. Those contained in a court file Tuesday were the criminal complaint, a procedural scheduling order, a special assignment order assigning the case to Superior Court Justice Daniel Mitchell, requests from media outlets to cover McDonald’s initial appearance and a motion to impound certain documents.

McDonald’s attorneys, Scott Hess and co-counsel Lisa W.D. Whittier, filed an unopposed motion to impound affidavits, reports, photographs, and recordings until an indictment is handed down, court records show. A judge granted the order without a hearing, according to court records.

“Recognizing that the court has to balance the public’s right of access with the defense’s interest in protecting the individuals identified in the affidavit in an ongoing investigation as well as the privacy rights of those individuals identified within the affidavit, and to protect the Defendant’s right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury, survives this balancing test,” Whittier wrote in the motion, adding that Hess spoke with Assistant Attorney General Lisa Bogue about sealing the documents.

Hess did not return a message left with his secretary and an email sent to him directly Tuesday.

Sigmund D. Schutz, a partner at the Portland law firm Preti Flaherty who represents the Maine Trust for Local News, said that without more specific reasons, either in a motion from attorneys or order from a judge, the decision to seal the documents was not justified.

“If that were sufficient basis to impound records, all records of this type, in all criminal prosecutions, would be impounded,” Schutz said Tuesday. “That would turn the presumption in favor of public access on its head. Those same justifications could be asserted in every single criminal case.”

The criminal complaint, a document that states the charge against a defendant, was not sealed Tuesday. The complaint was not available after McDonald’s initial appearance, when it is usually contained in a public file.

The complaint only lists the date of birth for the victim McDonald is accused of murdering, not a name.

Asked for examples of similar cases in which a minor victim was not named, Hayes, of the attorney general’s office, sent one.

In that case, Lisa Barney was indicted on a charge of manslaughter in the death of a 4-month-old infant in Oakland. Barney was indicted in September 2024, according to court records, and the death occurred in August 2023.

SPECULATION CONTINUES

Speculation, meanwhile, has not subsided about the victim in the Sidney killing.

News of McDonald’s arrest came the same day that Carl Gartley, superintendent of Regional School Unit 18, said in an announcement to the community that a Messalonskee High School student had died “due to a violent act” but could not release a name due to an ongoing Maine State Police investigation. Sidney is one of the towns served by the Oakland-based district.

Commenters on social media posts from multiple news outlets have asked why published news stories do not identify the alleged victim, with some offering the name of who they believe the boy is.

A woman who lives near the Summerhaven Road residence said the day after police ruled the death a homicide that she knew the boy and wanted to talk about him but would not do so until officials release his name.

At least two Maine TV stations, WMTW and WGME, have reported that the 14-year-old was McDonald’s son, citing anonymous neighbors. WGME reported the boy’s name Dec. 27, citing a local athletic association and anonymous neighbors, according to an online version of the story.

The Morning Sentinel is not publishing the name because it has not been independently confirmed.

The victim’s date of birth on the criminal complaint charging McDonald with murder matches the date of birth listed for a child of McDonald’s listed on a divorce judgment filed in Lewiston District Court in 2015, according to court records.

The name of the child listed in divorce records matches an online fundraiser that shows it was created Dec. 23. A message sent through the fundraising platform to organizers was not returned Tuesday.

Shannon Moss, public information officer for the Maine Department of Public Safety, has deferred questions about identifying the boy to the attorney general’s office multiple times in the last week. Moss had said in an email the day after state police ruled the death a homicide that she had hoped to release the boy’s name, but it was up to the attorney general’s office to decide.

In other recent homicides involving children in Maine, authorities released names of the victims promptly. Those include the deaths of 3-year-old Makinzlee Handrahan in Edgecomb and nearly-2-year-old Octavia Jean Huber-Young in Wells, both in 2022.

Maine prosecutors aren’t legally required to name a victim in criminal complaints, according to professor Jonathan Chapman at the University of Maine School of Law.

“It’s pretty clear to me that the state is well within its rights choosing not to allege the name of the victim,” said Chapman, who clarified he has no personal knowledge of McDonald’s case.

Chapman was an assistant U.S. attorney for more than 30 years. He didn’t handle homicides, but said it’s common practice in federal courts not to name victims or witnesses in robberies and drug trafficking cases, out of “a recognition that witnesses who cooperate, and victims who cooperate, are often in danger.”

Even if a victim or witness was dead, Chapman could still see the merits of withholding information to protect their families.

“It comes down to, ‘Do you need to do it?’” Chapman said. “Everybody is much more concerned nowadays about personally identifying information.”

CHANGES IN PRACTICE?

Schutz, the newspaper’s attorney, said he questions what has changed that has led the attorney general’s office to alter its policy on releasing minor victims’ names.

“It’s a change in the state’s practice that is apparently not supported by any change in law, or not the product of any public process that would support a drastic increase in secrecy when it comes to the criminal justice system,” Schutz said. “Here, you have an adult charged with an extremely serious crime (and) a deceased victim. And under those circumstances, at least after the next of kin are notified, in Maine, the victim has always been identified.”

Shira Burns, executive director of the Maine Prosecutors’ Association, said Tuesday that for several years, perhaps decades, prosecutors have redacted names of child victims of sexual assaults in court documents. That has since been extended to adult victims of sexual assaults and child victims of other kinds of crimes, according to Burns.

Burns emphasized that she could not comment on homicide cases, since her group works with district attorney’s offices and her background as a prosecutor was not in the attorney general’s office, which prosecutes homicides in Maine.

It is not a required practice, she said, and prosecutors consider the facts of each case and constitutional rights of defendants, the media and others in making their decision to redact a name in court filings.

“I will say, at some point, it wasn’t normal to redact children’s names that are victims of crimes,” Burns said. “And what we have learned through our education is that the criminal justice system is not victim-centered and trauma-informed. That’s not where the basis is, and we need to move in that direction.”

Tina H. Nadeau, executive director of the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said she agrees protecting a victim’s identity makes sense in cases involving crimes other than homicide.

But, she said, “It makes little to no sense here.”

“When a child dies, it is a tragedy, whose impact is felt far and wide in the close-knit communities of this state,” Nadeau said in a written statement. “Keeping the victim’s name confidential does nothing to ensure the privacy of the victim — or the victim’s family. The public’s right-to-know outweighs any supposed privacy concerns, particularly as the child is no longer with us. Surely the identity of the person who died is just as important to the public as the identity of the person who is accused of killing them.

“In light of several recent high-profile child deaths involving DHHS negligence, this latest policy shift by the AG’s Office feels like an attempt to further cloak the abuse of children in a shroud of confidentiality that does nothing to actually protect children.”

In her statement, Nadeau continued by linking to an online fundraiser containing what she believes is child victim’s name and said people know it was McDonald’s son who died.

“I don’t know the source of the ‘feedback’ to which the AG’s Office is referencing, but the secrecy here is unfounded and unprecedented — and unsupported by the law,” Nadeau said in the statement.

Silverman, of the First Amendment Coalition, also said it is unusual for the name of an alleged murder victim to be withheld by officials, when it seems many people already know it.

“Here, you had a murder that occurred in our community, and the public should have accurate information about what occurred and who the victim was,” Silverman said. “And if most of the people in the community already know the name of the victim, then that would be an argument against any kind of secrecy on behalf of the AG’s office.”

Kennebec Journal reporter Ethan Horton and Press Herald reporter Emily Allen contributed to this story.

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