ME ME - James Angelo, 27, Portland, 7 Sept 2008

After hearing gunshots, hospital employees found James Angelo wounded in a fenced-in hospital parking lot. He was treated in Mercy’s emergency room before being transferred to Maine Medical Center, where he died, police said.

Witnesses told police that two people walking along Winter Street “had some kind of engagement with the victim” and fled in opposite directions after shots were fired around 4 a.m., Chief Joseph Loughlin said.

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At 14, Angelo arrived in Maine without any English, but with incredible footwork. Despite his stature — he stood at 5’3” as an adult — Angelo was a highly skilled soccer player. He played varsity soccer at Portland High School and coached a youth soccer team, Portland United, after graduation. He is remembered as being deeply invested in the team.

“You can watch him on the sideline, whenever we screwed up, jumping up and down, dropping his clipboard,” said Alfred Jacob, who now coaches United. “Or you would see him running up and down whenever there was a goal.” Sometimes when his team scored, Angelo would run onto the field, screaming in celebration with them. “He was someone with a good heart,” Jacob said. “You know, when you talk to him, he’s very straightforward, he doesn’t dodge around the corner.”

Off the field, Angelo was eminently calm and collected. According to his family, he was planning to enroll in a criminal justice program and hoped to become a police officer. He was soft-spoken, a peacemaker who would get involved in an altercation to break up the fight.

“James was a more reserved than a dominant person,” Genet Gebrewahd, a friend, said. Like many of Angelo’s friends, Gebrewahd remembers “just his smile — his beautiful smile — and his gentle personality and his respectfulness.”

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On Sept. 7, 2008, shortly before James Angelo was shot while working as a security guard at Mercy Hospital, a surveillance camera at a nearby business captured grainy images of two shadowy figures in the vicinity of the shooting, Assistant Police Chief Michael Sauschuck said Wednesday.

Sauschuck said he believes those two people were somehow involved in the shooting, and he hopes the lure of a $30,000 cash reward will prompt one of them to contact police.

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Portland Maine Police Department​

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