LEWISTON, Maine — Gabe Hirst sat on a bench on Lisbon Street in Lewiston on Saturday. On either side of him sat big plastic buckets filled with flowers. He handed them to strangers walking by, to encourage them to smile again.
“If one person’s day is just a little bit better, then it was all worth it. If you help someone, you help everyone,” Hirst said.
Hirst drove up Friday morning from Gray with his mom, dad and sister to be present and help begin to bring back joy to a place reeling from the mass shootings that killed 18 and wounded 13 Wednesday night, he said.
He did not personally know anyone killed in the shootings, but Maine is a small state.
“You know a guy who knows a guy,” Hirst said.
On Saturday — a day after the shelter-in-place advisories were lifted and Robert R. Card II, the main suspect in the mass shootings at Schemengees Bar and Grille and Just-In-Time Recreation bowling alley, was found dead — people walked around downtown Lewiston, shopped and spent time in parks.
Paul Poliquin was outside the store he has owned and operated for 50 years, Paul’s Clothing & Shoe Store on Lisbon St., cleaning his windows Saturday afternoon. He isn’t normally on a ladder scrubbing his windows clean at the end of October, but he just wanted to be outside because things were finally different, he said.
“We closed for two days, like everyone, and there was nothing going on down here. But today, everything has changed,” he said. “Everyones’ spirits are right up there, but you know we cannot forget.”
Poliquin has lived in Lewiston for 50 years. He served on the city council for 10 years and resides about a block away from Just-In-Time Recreation. He heard the shots from Card’s gun echo through the night air and the sound of sirens coming from every direction Wednesday night, he said.
Since then, he prayed more times than he can count for the state’s largest manhunt in recent memory to end. He has been praying for the victims and their families, too.
“It just shows you what one guy can do to cripple an entire city,” he said. “There’s going to be a longtime for healing. I’ve just never, never, never seen anything like it.”
Paper hearts with messages of support for the city were affixed to the trees that run parallel on either side of Lisbon Street. Children rode bikes, and parents felt safe enough to be outside.
One parent, Kate Webber, was changing her young child’s diaper in her car on Lisbon Street. She and her husband help run a local storytime event in Lewiston, and she has already started brainstorming ways to use the gathering to share good memories, she said.
“With a new baby, I’m thinking a lot about the families who are affected, and your imagination kind of runs wild,” said Webber, who lives in Sabattus but was in Lewiston when the shootings happened. “We’re still wrapping our heads around it.”
For Bates College students Sophia Cattalani, Alison Robelen, Keira January and Julianne Massa, mass shootings have become so common that they thought they were desensitized to them — that is until their college town became one of the many in the United States to experience such violence.
“It feels very different when it happens in a community that you’ve been a part of,” Cattalani said.
The four students said they felt safe and continue to feel safe at Bates, but their fear was real at the time of the shootings, Robelen said.
They hope the city where they go to college doesn’t get blamed for the acts of one person, January said. Lewiston is a safe place that is feeling a tremendous loss, she said.
Now that Card has been found dead, a new chapter can begin for Lewiston, said Hussein Ahmed of Lewiston.
People “can go back and visit neighbors and say hi, go to their prayer places, worship. So we’re slowly seeing life coming back to us.”
While Lewiston is a safe city, the shootings have brought back violent memories for many in the Lewiston immigrant community who fled their homes to come to Maine for safety, he said. But now that Card is dead, healing can begin.
“It will take a long time to heal, but we are still standing,” he said. “A new chapter of life is going to start. The rebuilding process is going to start, and as a community we stand with our neighbors.”
