Bonnie Dennison and her son admire the view in Andover earlier this month. Dennison fought all the way to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to keep her son’s father, who nearly killed him as an infant, away from them. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

Bonnie Dennison’s day took a strange turn on the warm and sunny afternoon of June 1, 2022, when she got a surprise knock on her door in Auburn.

Asked to speak with Bonnie Corbin, Dennison’s maiden name, Dennison was hesitant to disclose her identity to the unassuming older gentleman. The man said he was trying to serve court paperwork from the birth father of her then-10-year-old son. The paperwork outlined proceedings for shared rights and visitation.

Dennison said she tried laughing the paperwork off because it had been eight years since she last saw Allen-Michael St. Claire, both locking eyes for the last time in a courtroom in May 2014. St. Claire was sentenced to 2½ years in jail for felony-level aggravated assault against their child a year earlier.

That makes it over 11 years, now, since St. Claire and her son, CC, last saw each other. (To protect his privacy, the Sun Journal is referring to the boy by his initials.)

“It’s hard to explain how I felt,” said Dennison, who now lives with her children in another Maine town. “Shocked, blown away — because I never thought of it being an option — scared, horrified at the thought. I spent probably a good half-hour talking to the gentleman who came to serve the paperwork, asking him questions about what comes next and sharing the circumstances surrounding the case.”

On an early day in May 2013, a 2-month-old CC was home from a week in the hospital at Central Maine Medical Center with broken ribs and a resulting bout of pneumonia. The injuries, unexplained at the time, made for a very fussy baby, Dennison said. Returning home after a long week at the hospital, St. Claire sent Dennison to bed to rest up. He’d take care of the baby, Dennison recalled.

When she woke up the next morning, Dennison discovered CC in his crib, his head swollen to twice its normal size. St. Claire said he put the baby down to go outside for a cigarette and when he returned, a fan had fallen on his head.

Dennison and St. Claire rushed CC to St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center in Lewiston where he was assessed and then transported to Maine Medical Center in Portland. Doctors there discovered a blood clot in his brain which could have killed him. CC also suffered several more broken ribs and a resulting spleen rupture.

On the way to MMC, Dennison recalled St. Claire going into further details about CC’s injuries, suggesting Dennison’s 4-year-old may have also dropped a toy on CC’s head.

Hospital staff reported the injuries to police who questioned Dennison and St. Claire at the hospital. St. Claire maintained that a fan fell on CC’s head, but he eventually confessed to injuring the infant himself.

St. Claire was squeezing the crying baby and ran his head into a door frame with a shoulder-check. These facts were represented in recent court documents and in past Sun Journal coverage.

“There’s nothing I can say that’s going to justify and make up for the heinous crime I committed,” St. Claire said at his sentencing. “I was overwhelmed. I was stressed. I was unprepared and immature. I was selfish and I thought about myself at the time.”

St. Claire said leading up to the time of the assault, he was upset Dennison had been talking to another man during her pregnancy. St. Claire became withdrawn, he said, playing video games and smoking marijuana, and pretending to be somebody else. He said he began doubting his ability to be a father and felt his infant son didn’t like him.

St. Claire was sentenced in July 2014 to 4 1/2 half years in prison, but would serve just 2 1/2 years agreed to by his defense attorney and prosecutors.

CC made a recovery doctors could not guarantee, and for eight years since that day in the hospital, St. Claire would be out of the picture.

Then came the knock on the door.

THE COURT REQUIRES VISITS

Despite two hearings via Zoom in the six months after Dennison was served the court paperwork in June 2022, she said she firmly believed Maine’s family laws would shield CC from St. Claire’s petition to the court. It wasn’t until a court ordered mediation that the mother realized St. Claire’s intentions might be a possibility.

When that mediation failed in December 2023, Dennison acknowledged that due to the court process, CC would learn the full reason he did not have a relationship with St. Claire. Up until then, he only knew an “age appropriate” reason and if anyone was going to provide the grittier details, it would be her. So, Dennison told her son everything that happened to him at the hands of his father. Dennison vowed to fight St. Claire in court and to never allow her son’s abuser, his own father, to see him again.

Maine District Court Judge Sarah Churchill would send down her judgment in September 2023 ordering Dennison to establish contact between CC and his father and then, later, to work with the father to schedule visitations.

According to Churchill’s 13-page judgment, citing Maine’s parental rights and responsibilities statute, Title 19-A §1653(3), which specifically governs the best interest of a child, CC would have supervised visits with St. Claire following four months of written correspondence. St. Claire was to write CC no more than twice a week and CC could write St. Claire as often as he’d like. The supervised visitations after those four months would continue for six months and increase to two visits per month so long as St. Claire was consistent with weekly written communication with CC.

While Dennison retained sole parental rights and responsibilities and St. Claire continued to pay child support, the judgment did provide that St. Claire would have access to all of CC’s medical and school records.

Dennison appealed the judgment to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, which unanimously upheld Churchill’s judgment on June 27, 2024.

Bonnie Dennison walks with her son along a road in Andover earlier this month. Dennison fought all the way to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court to keep her son’s father, who nearly killed him as an infant, away from them. Andree Kehn/Sun Journal

In her judgment, Churchill called Dennison’s choice to share “all the gory details” of St. Claire’s crime an “inappropriate trauma dump” on CC, especially for posting about their talk on Facebook and raising the subject when CC expressed interest in learning about his father.

The judge went on to highlight several grievances with both St. Claire and Dennison. Churchill said St. Claire was shortsighted and lacked an understanding of the potential impact on CC with his suggestion that he could first introduce himself as a family friend through his mother before revealing to CC that he is his father.

Likewise, Churchill noted that Dennison’s concern for CC’s physical safety was overshadowing any concerns for his mental and emotional wellbeing when she suggested to the court that CC have contact starting in his mid-teens when he would be physically strong enough to defend himself.

Churchill said Dennison was wrong to believe leaving “this situation … unaddressed until CC is 16 to 18 to make his own decision.” The judge said that would risk leaving CC emotionally unequipped to navigate the situation and could stunt his emotional development.

“It is not in CC’s best interest for the adults in his immediate household to stick their heads in the sand and hope Mr. St. Claire goes away or that time on its own will magically heal all wounds physical and emotional,” Churchill said.

Churchill also said in the decision that Dennison’s frame of mind raises concerns about her capacity to follow any order the court issues. She said that is understandable and reasonable given the circumstances, but it makes evident Dennison’s “lack of insight into how CC’s mental and emotional needs and development could benefit or need some sort of therapeutic-based contact with Mr. St. Claire.”

Churchill said St. Claire’s explanation for the lag time between the end of his incarceration and his attempt to reconcile with CC through his case filing in June 2022 was that he needed time to make sure he was ready before reentering CC’s life. She addressed this as also understandable, but shortsighted in the understanding of CC’s mental and emotional needs. St. Claire needs further therapy to learn how to be a part of CC’s healing process, she said.

“This is the most important arena for Mr. St. Claire to have made gains in and he has not done so,” said Churchill.

ATTORNEYS WEIGH IN

St. Claire’s attorney, Jim Howaniec, advised his client not to speak to the press. Howaniec, however, agreed to speak in July to St. Claire’s efforts to exercise his parental rights, which Howaniec considers fulfilled by Churchill’s judgment.

“The judge considered everything. Allen-Michael has been a model citizen. He made a mistake as a young father, paid for it, and has since bettered himself,” Howaniec said. Churchill acknowledged that St. Claire has participated in all suggested counseling services and programs since before his incarceration through the court proceedings.

“Now, he’s seeking to assert his parental rights, which he is entitled to,” Howaniec said. “From our perspective, this is a matter that should be litigated in family court, not in the media. It’s unfortunate that the mother has decided to bring this case to the public’s attention.”

Dennison’s attorney, Chris L’Hommedieu, said in July that he argued Maine’s legal definition of “abandonment,” which is no less than six months from the date of last contact. Even counting out St. Claire’s 2 1/2-year stint in prison, six years went by before the father’s 2022 attempt at communication.

L’Hommedieu said the linchpin of his argument in court was that St. Claire’s sudden interest in forming a relationship with CC is not in the child’s best interest.

“And that (interest was expressed) through a legal complaint petitioning the court for his parental rights,” L’Hommedieu said. “When a person comes forward and says to a court, ‘Hey, I would like to be involved with my kid’s life,’ they carry the burden of proof. In a family case, you have to prove that it’s in the best interests of the child to do XYZ.”

As far as L’Hommedieu is concerned, there wasn’t much proof for Churchill to work with. CC has no memory of St. Claire, who stayed out of his life for 10 years, and St. Claire has no knowledge of CC’s needs or interests, L’Hommedieu said. CC lives in a stable home with stepsiblings whom he loves and gets along with and a stepfather who wants to adopt him, all facts Churchill illustrated in her judgment, L’Hommedieu said.

L’Hommedieu also disagreed with some of the judge’s criticisms of Dennison, specifically on his client’s choice to share with her son all of the long unaddressed details of the crime St. Claire committed against him.

“What are you going to do as a parent? In a perfect world, do I want my client to have to say that they did that in front of a judge? No. But if you’re a real parent, you’re going to say, ‘Listen, here’s what happened, and it’s important for you to know this. Because you’re going to learn it eventually, and if you don’t hear it from me, you’re going to be mad.’”

When the Sun Journal reached out to both parties in July, the four-month written correspondence period was over and St. Claire had engaged a firm specializing in supervised visits. Expecting a visit to occur within that month, Howaniec said St. Claire was ready to file a contempt motion and seek penalties if that didn’t happen.

That is exactly what St. Claire did last month, Howaniec said in a recent email. The contempt hearing is set for Nov. 12, he said.

“I’ve tried to consider the mother’s perspective. We bent over backwards to address her concerns, but there comes a point when enough is enough,” Howaniec said in July. “We’ve been through two rounds of litigation, and now it’s time for my client’s rights to be realized. We will aggressively pursue those rights, regardless of the media involvement.”

There are no realistic legal avenues after having unsuccessfully appealed the case to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, L’Hommedieu said. Dennison said she wasn’t sure how she is going to deal with the ruling.

‘I REMEMBER EVERYTHING’

Since speaking to the Sun Journal in mid-July and after a segment aired on WCSH-TV News Center Maine, Dennison said the state’s Office of Child and Family Services visited her home and interviewed CC without explanation. She said she isn’t sure if someone filed a report in retaliation or if the visit was ordered by the court, but it has shaken her family’s sense of normality.

Likewise, OCFS is investigating St. Claire, digging into prison records for therapy session notes to find evidence he was indeed putting in effort toward change, Dennison said. She learned this from the caseworker who visited her home, she said.

“They are digging more into Allen’s ‘rehabilitation’ than the judge ever did. They’re getting records from the prison and said they want the notes from his therapy sessions to see what kind of effort he put into trying to change,” Dennison said. “Why isn’t that something the courts require when coming to a decision like they did with CC?”

Dennison told the Sun Journal recently that conflicting schedules and school time hadn’t yet accommodated a visit between CC and St. Claire. The supervised visits will be about 1 1/2 hours from their home, so they will have to happen on Saturdays, she said.

As a result, St. Claire pushed to establish contact with CC via email. The request was granted, but after two emails from CC saying he did not want to see or speak to his father, St. Claire stopped sending emails. From the beginning, CC hadn’t expressed any interest in corresponding with St. Claire, Dennison said, and she is not forcing him to. St. Claire also has not mailed any more letters, Dennison said.

In June, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court upheld Churchill’s judgment and order. Since then, Dennison said she is working to keep life as normal as possible for her family and for CC. As for herself, Dennison constantly needs to battle difficult memories.

“It’s a complete and total nightmare. CC doesn’t remember what happened to him as he was so little, but I do,” Dennison said. “I remember everything.”

She can remember waking up, greeted by CC’s green, swollen and misshapen head. She said she remembers questioning St. Claire and receiving nothing but vague half-responses. She remembers the initial doctor’s appointment at St. Mary’s where doctors knew right away CC was severely injured, would need X-rays and a transfer to MMC’s neonatal intensive care unit. She remembers not being able to go with him.

“I remember the anxious moments in the waiting room while Allen was being questioned by police and (OCFS). As each second ticked by, I started realizing that Allen was the perpetrator and CC could have died,” Dennison said. “I remember learning how to take care of a broken infant so I wouldn’t hurt him more, staring at CC all hooked up to tubes and wires, tiny in that hospital bed, the joy I felt when he finally took his bottle after pleading with the doctors to give me one last chance to try to get him to eat before they put in a feeding tube.”

For Dennison, all those moments are like watching a movie on repeat.

“And I don’t know how to make it stop,” Dennison continued. “I’m living in a constant state of panic and cry any time I’m alone, all while trying to keep our home life as normal as possible to limit the kids feeling the chaos.”

“As far as I know, I have no further options other than to comply or face jail time,” Dennison said. “I’m terrified to send him to do this. I feel completely lost and hopeless, like I’m drowning trying to fight and keep my son safe and away from the man who easily could have killed him.”