Exclusive: Kelly Stewart Quits High-Paying State Hospital Job
It’s been a month since the longtime town leader pleaded guilty to stealing from the Volunteer Fire Department.
“Ms. Stewart resigned effective 3/4/2025,” was the terse reply from Lindsay Hammes, press secretary for Maine’s DHHS.
That was her response to my umpteenth (and hopefully, final) official query — since the summer of 2023 — regarding the employment status of Kelly Stewart. That’s when I started reporting on this case, soon after the ex-Sumner Select Board member resigned her elected position after locals discovered that she and her fire chief hubby, Bob Stewart, had been misusing fire department funds for personal gain.
Mugshots of Kelly (top) and Bob Stewart courtesy of Oxford County Sheriff.
(You can read HERE and HERE two previous EXTENSIVE Crash Reports all about the Stewarts, including the details of the taxpayer-funded $60,000 investigation and Kelly’s conspiratorial claim she was framed by other volunteer firefighters.)
Kelly had worked as the “Forensic Outpatient Services Director” at Riverview Psychiatric Hospital since 2016 and had been on administrative leave since late August, 2024. Based upon numbers provided by the state, she earned about $66,000 for the six months she sat at home, shooting guns and telling tall tales while her lawyer stalled her guilty plea and she kept collecting a fat state paycheck.
Which means, theoretically, the court-ordered $15,000 in restitution she paid to the town of Sumner could’ve came from her state taxpayer-paid salary.
Yikes. Talk about a golden parachute. And all thanks to a plea agreement that reduced the couples’ “theft by deception” charges from Class C felony to a Class D misdemeanor.
Copping a plea was a very good deal for the Stewarts. As a couple of gun-fetishizing weirdos, a felony conviction would’ve forced the closure of “Foothills Firearms Safety,” their combo gun shop and triplex of rifle and pistol shooting ranges in the backyard of their house in the bucolic western Maine countryside.
Also, thanks to having mere misdemeanors on their criminal records — rather than felonies — they can retain the licenses and tax stamps to continue selling fully-automatic weapons and silencers from their store. A felony would’ve also put an end to their backyard biz of selling overpriced bullets to rifle-range customers who don’t have their own land (or understanding spouses) to shoot fully-auto weapons and blast through boxes of ammo.
Losing her job with the state, though, gives Kelly more time to work at the gun shop and provide “individual or group firearm instruction” as presented in the video below.
Hammes, from DHHS, declined to answers any further questions, so we don’t know why Kelly kept drawing a paycheck for a couple weeks after her Feb. 14th guilty plea. No matter, though. A lot of people involved with the case are just relieved she’s no longer in a position of authority at the state hospital, where she supervised social workers dealing with folks found “not criminally responsible” by the courts.
No word, either, if her guilty plea impacts her current licensing as a “clinical professional counselor,” which expires next summer.
The plea deal, as I explain in this Crash Report, was a so-called “deferred disposition” which means as long as the couple stays out trouble until a judicial review next year, they won’t do any jail time.
I’ve already marked that date on my calendar: Feb. 13, 2026 in Courtroom Number 1, Oxford County Courthouse.
If you appreciate how the Crash Report covers stories other media won’t, then please become a paid subscriber. This weekend is the last chance for six bucks monthly or sixty dollar annual membership before the March 17th price hike.