On November 21, 2024, first responders in Westbrook, Maine, were sent to a home after 47-year-old James Fowler reported finding his roommate unresponsive. When firefighters and police entered the residence, James directed them toward a bedroom where 59-year-old Robert Seager was lying on the floor. Robert was still alive, but only barely, and responders immediately noticed severe injuries to his face. The condition of the room and the state of Robert's body made a simple medical emergency seem unlikely from the beginning.
One responder asked James how long Robert had been down. James first explained that Robert sometimes disappeared for periods of time and said he had gone out two nights earlier. According to James, Robert later returned badly injured and claimed he had been attacked near railroad tracks. James said he had offered to call an ambulance, but Robert had supposedly begged him not to.
The timeline quickly became confusing. James said Robert had been injured for at least two days, yet when responders asked how long he had been lying on the floor, James answered that it had only just happened. When the responders tried to understand whether Robert had fallen, James said he had not heard a fall and did not believe Robert had fallen at all. The questioning eventually clarified that James had found Robert in bed and moved him to the floor before help arrived.
Before Robert was moved, responders kept James nearby while medics worked. He repeatedly tried to explain that Robert sometimes disappeared and that the injuries had already been there when he came home. Asked where Robert had gone, James admitted he did not know, only that he had found him near the railroad tracks. The more specific the responders became about when Robert was last normal, when he had been found, and how he ended up on the floor, the harder it became for James to give one simple sequence of events.
Robert's facial injuries immediately raised more questions. James said he had noticed them on the same night Robert returned home and claimed Robert told him he had been jumped. At another point, James suggested Robert might have hurt himself because he sometimes picked at his skin. He also floated the possibility that Robert had run himself into a tree, while repeatedly insisting that he did not know how much of Robert's story about being attacked could be believed.
James said Robert had seemed functional the previous night. He claimed Robert had even helped him clear items from the basement, though he acknowledged that Robert had some difficulty walking up the stairs. To the officers, that description was difficult to reconcile with a man who was now barely conscious and suffering extensive facial trauma. One of the officers soon realized that the cameras inside the home might provide a way to test the story.
The house had security cameras, and James apparently had access to them. Officers discussed obtaining footage to determine whether Robert had really been moving around with the injuries James described and to establish when his condition had changed. Robert was rushed to a local hospital while an on-call detective was asked to respond. Once the immediate medical emergency had passed, investigators began trying to build a precise timeline.
When the detective arrived, James was still visibly worked up and talked almost continuously. He said he understood why investigators wanted a complete timeline now that the scene had calmed down, but he also insisted he had been terrified that Robert might die in the house. He described the possibility of a dead body in the residence as something he could not handle and then tried to soften his own image by joking about his supposedly cold heart. That mixture of anxiety, affection, and constant explanation would become important later when detectives compared his words with what the cameras had recorded.
James spoke at length about his relationship with Robert. He said he had known him for more than a decade and explained that he had been in a long-term relationship with Robert's sister, Teresa. According to James, Teresa had recently moved away and Robert had become depressed. James portrayed himself as the person who stepped in to take care of him.
He described telling Robert, "You are my brother. I got you," and claimed he had been making sure Robert ate, rested, and did not have to worry about daily needs. James repeatedly emphasized that he cared deeply about Robert and said he had not realized how much affection he had for him until the emergency unfolded. The image he presented was that of a reluctant but devoted caretaker trying to help a struggling man.
Teresa joined the conversation by speakerphone. She and James discussed Robert's recent condition and suggested he had not been eating properly. Teresa said they had tried to get him to eat, while James described Robert as stubborn and unwilling to accept help. But starvation could not explain the severe injuries to Robert's face, and the focus kept returning to the question of how those injuries had happened.
James again repeated the story that Robert had been attacked near the railroad tracks. At the same time, he added more uncertainty, suggesting Robert might have hurt himself somehow. Investigators were left with several possibilities being offered by the same person: an assault by strangers, self-inflicted injury, or some unexplained accident. None of those theories yet accounted for everything officers were seeing inside the home.