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3 deaths within popular family stun Maine town

Deputy Ryan Chubbuck monitored the entrance to a residence on Lakeside Drive, where a couple was found dead Saturday.DEREK DAVIS/PORTLAND PRESS HERALD

The bodies of three people found in two Boothbay Harbor homes Saturday were identified Sunday as popular community figures Carol and Svend Jorgensen and their 40-year-old son, Eric, shifting the mood in the coastal Maine town from shock to grieving disbelief.

Officials declined to provide details except to say that no one other than the three was involved. Police first found 75-year-old Carol and 71-year-old Svend in their home after responding to a request for a well-being check, then discovered their son in a second family home — his late grandparents’ farmhouse — about a 3-mile drive away, police said.

“You just can’t cope with it. It’s such a disaster,” said Loraine Nickerson, a neighbor who had known Carol Jorgensen and her family for decades. “Everybody in the Harbor loved them. They were just magnificent people.”

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Eric Jorgensen had spent time on archeological digs and taught advanced-placement history and other subjects at a Portland high school, according to neighbors and a former colleague. His parents were well-traveled retirees — his father from Denmark, his mother from the Boothbay area — who raised their children in three countries and were popular figures around town, known for being thoughtful and warm.

“They were delightful people, true friends,” said Tony Heyl, who had shared breakfast with them hundreds of times at a local diner in the past two decades. Heyl, a Manhattan sculptor, had taken over Carol Jorgensen’s elderly parents’ watch and jewelry shop in the charming commercial district abutting the harbor.

Heyl said Eric Jorgensen — and his surviving brother, Peter, who lives in Freeport with his young family — seemed outwardly “happy-go-lucky, positive, and successful.”

“Of all the families,” Heyl said, “you would never even propose that it would be possible.”

Questions that swirled among Boothbay Harbor’s roughly 2,000 year-round residents after police tape appeared outside 236 Lakeside Drive and 46 Montgomery Road remained largely unanswered when Maine State Police identified the Jorgensens but declined to provide any explanation about what happened and how they died.

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“You can’t wrap your head around it,” said Susan Foss, a longtime neighbor on Montgomery Road, where Carol Jorgensen’s parents, Fred and Gladys Pratt, had bought a farmhouse in the 1940s.

Neither came from coastal or farming stock: Gladys grew up in Newton, Mass., and Fred’s family was steeped in Waltham’s watchmaking business.

But the Pratts were drawn by an opening for a watch and clock repairman in a small jewelry shop in Boothbay Harbor and the appeal of small-town life. They eventually took over the business and ran the shop together while raising their daughter, Carol, on a five-acre homestead, where they kept horses, sheep, and pigs, and grew vegetables. They called it Pratt’s Harmony Farm.

Carol and Svend Jorgensen had lived in Denmark, Scotland, and England before settling in Maine, raising their boys in Boothbay and making frequent visits to her parents’ farm, half a mile from the ocean, Foss said.

After Carol Jorgensen’s parents died, she persuaded Eric to return from the Portland area in May to live in the vacant farmhouse, keeping it in the family, Nickerson said.

Svend, who was 71, retired in 2014 as an engineer and principal with General Dynamics at the Bath Iron Works shipyard, according to a company newsletter. He also had served on Boothbay’s planning board. Neighbors gave different depictions of his wife’s career, but said Carol worked in the travel business. Her Facebook profile photo showed her smiling and clutching an alto saxophone in front of patriotic bunting. She played in the high school band 60 years ago, Foss said, and continued to play with alumni band members.

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Foss said she had run into Eric several times since he had moved into the red-shingled farmhouse, and nothing seemed unusual. “He was a quiet young man, very personable, though,” she said.

Carol and Svend Jorgensen’s bodies were found in the Lakeside Drive home where they moved two years ago, after an unusual swap with liquor magnate-turned-developer Paul Coulombe.

They had lived for 24 years on a hilltop in Boothbay with ocean views. When Coulombe wanted the site for a country-club clubhouse, he traded them a spacious new home on four acres beside a Boothbay Harbor cove known as West Harbor Pond.

“They were delighted,” Heyl said.

Jason Aceto, a social studies teacher who worked with Eric Jorgensen at Catherine McAuley High School, an all-girls Catholic college-prep school in Portland, last year, said he knew him professionally and chatted with him about their shared love of the outdoors. He said Jorgensen was passionate about skiing and surfing.

“He was always in good spirits and positive with the students,” said Aceto.

Aceto said he thought Jorgensen had spent two different stints teaching at McAuley, leaving in between to work on archeological digs. Jorgensen’s classroom website included photos taken on digs in Alabama and New York as well as Maine.

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“He brought in some of his background as an archeologist and had some students doing digging in the woods next to the school,” Aceto said.

In Boothbay Harbor, Nickerson and other friends continued to wait for answers.

“I can’t imagine what could have been so horrible” that it would end with three dead, she said. “It’ll take a long time before the Harbor recovers.”

The parents of Carol Jorgensen bought this Montgomery Road property in the 1940s. Carol’s son Eric was found dead at the site. His parents’ bodies were also found Saturday.DEREK DAVIS/PORTLAND PRESS HERALD

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at eric.moskowitz@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeMoskowitz.