BURLINGTON—A 34-year-old Haverhill man could face life in prison after being accused of shooting and killing Michael Pimental in 2018.
Federal prosecutors announced a new indictment last week against several co-conspirators involved in Pimental’s death, and they accused John Welch of shooting Pimental on Oct. 13, 2018.
Pimental’s bullet-riddled body was found by a property owner along the wooded edge of his driveway in Concord, Vermont on Oct. 14, 2018. The same day, Pimental’s girlfriend Krystal Whitcomb, 28, of Waterford, and Michael Hayes, 38, of Washington, D.C., were taken into custody by police in Benton after a traffic stop.
Investigators say the found blood belonging to Pimental in the silver Cadillac Hayes was driving at the time of the stop. The Cadillac was registered to Pimental. Police also recovered three firearms, 2,600 bags of heroin, and $20,000 in cash.
Authorities said they found Whitcomb and Pimental had been distributing heroin out of their residence in Waterford. They also charged her father, Shawn, in connection to the case.
In February 2019, Welch offered to sell a firearm to a person in New Hampshire, according to a news release from the U.S. District Attorney’s Office in Vermont. Shortly thereafter, law enforcement found Welch along the side of the road in Bath, trying to dig frozen ground with a shovel.

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BRADFORD—Maybe a third time will be the charm.
The Oxbow Unified Union School District Board met last week to finalize a third proposal, trimming another $190,000 from the 2020-2021 budget, after voters rejected two previous versions.
The online audience continues to grow with every meeting held remotely, which is a plus, according to the board, which is searching for ways to reach constituents and share information. Last week’s meeting on Sept. 16 had 44 attendees who listened in, a number that has increased over time.
Board members have been grasping to find why voters have rejected the budgets.
Other than Bud Haas, a former school director at Bradford Elementary School, most feedback reported at the Sept. 9 meeting encouraged the current direction of the school system and its board of directors. This seemed to influence the thinking of the board as a whole and leave the essential outline of the budget intact.
Haas recommended holding a town meeting style vote rather than a ballot, a commitment by the board to have articles of agreement ready for the next annual meeting that would assure voters no schools would close, renaming the district immediately to clarify confusion on the “Oxbow” district, and admitting that moving the supervisory union offices to the Copeland building was a mistake. Haas also noted that one of the other forced merger districts in Vermont has been permitted to dissolve in a recent state board decision.

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