Kittery Man Sentenced on Federal Interstate Domestic Violence Charges

PORTLAND, Maine—A Kittery man was sentenced today in federal court for two counts of traveling interstate to violate a protection order, Acting U.S. Attorney Donald E. Clark announced.

U.S. District Judge George Z. Singal sentenced Nelson Dion, 54, to 31 months in prison and three years of supervised release. Dion entered a conditional plea of guilty on August 31, 2020. The plea authorizes him to appeal a legal issue to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston. Dion will remain supervised on home incarceration in the interim. 

According to court documents, in April 2016, Dion, who resided in Maine, was arrested for felony aggravated assault involving his former live-in girlfriend, who was by then living in a domestic violence shelter in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. A few days later, Dion was released on bail and was subject to a protection order that prohibited his contact with his former girlfriend.

Between April and June 2016, Dion traveled from Maine to New Hampshire, and then from New Hampshire to Maine, to have contact with the girlfriend in violation of the protection order. On June 30, 2016, the girlfriend jumped from the Piscataqua River bridge on Interstate 95 and died the next day.

The Kittery, Berwick, and Eliot, Maine Police Departments; the York County District Attorney’s Office; the Portsmouth, New Hampshire Police Department; and the FBI investigated the case. It was prosecuted as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program bringing together all levels of law enforcement and the communities they serve to reduce violent crime and make our neighborhoods safer for everyone.