In just a matter of minutes, life in Maine changed forever.
A shooter walked into a Lewiston bowling alley and opened fire before leaving seconds later and continuing his rampage at a nearby bar. By the time the dust settled, 18 people were dead and another 13 wounded.
It has gone down as the deadliest mass shooting in modern Maine history and came just months after another explosion of violence that left four dead in Bowdoin and another three wounded on Interstate 295 in Yarmouth.
A year has come and gone. Investigations at the state and federal level, internal reviews, and independent reporting revealed authorities missed many opportunities to intervene and perhaps prevent the tragedy that unfolded on Oct. 25, 2023.
Some questions still remain unanswered, and unlike other recent mass shootings, few faced stiff sanctions for the lapses and failures investigators uncovered.
As we mark the anniversary of the Lewiston mass shooting, here’s what we know about that fateful day and its aftermath.
It took less than 15 minutes for the horror to unfold.
More than 60 patrons and employees, including 20 children, were gathered at Just-In-Time Recreation, a bowling alley, when the shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card II of Bowdoin, entered about 6:54 p.m.
He was inside for only 45 seconds, but in that time, he fired 18 rounds, killing eight people and wounding three more, according to the final report of the Independent Commission to Investigate the Facts of the Tragedy in Lewiston.
Dispatchers received their first 911 call from Just-In-Time about a minute later. Police arrived at the bowling alley at 6:59 p.m. By that time, the gunman was gone and moving toward his next target.
He arrived at Schemengees Bar and Grille, about 4 miles away from Just-In-Time, at 7:07 p.m. Inside he fired 36 rounds over 78 seconds, killing 10 people and wounding 10 others.
The first 911 call came in about a minute after the shooting started. Although police arrived at Schemengees by 7:13 p.m., the gunman was already gone.
The commission investigating the mass shooting noted the heroism and bravery of patrons and employees “saved many lives,” giving others the chance to flee and hide. In particular, Just-In-Time patrons Jason Walker and Michael Deslauriers II died charging Card in an attempt to disarm him, while at Schemengees bartender Joseph Walker died charging Card with a knife. An unknown patron at Schemengees turned off its main power, leaving the shooter in the dark. Card left six seconds later.
His white Subaru was found at a Lisbon boat launch three hours after the shooting at Schemengees.
In the aftermath, more than 400 law enforcement officers from local, county, state and federal agencies descended on the Lewiston area to find Card. The manhunt sent surrounding communities into lockdown and lasted nearly 48 hours until his body was found on the evening of Oct. 27 in a trailer at Maine Recycling Co. in Lisbon. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Lisbon police had swept the Maine Recycling Co. lot the night of the shooting. The fact that Card’s body was found days later in the center’s overflow lot raised many questions. Officers limited their initial search because they lacked backup and protective equipment and the lot was poorly lighted. Lisbon’s police chief told a state trooper about that brief search, but it never made its way to the manhunt’s commander, according to the report.
Questions remain about what exactly happened over those 48 hours. Was Card alive for some or most of that time? Did he go directly to Maine Recycling Co.?
“Despite extensive investigation, neither law enforcement nor the Commission has been able to determine Card’s whereabouts between the time he abandoned his vehicle at the Lisbon boat launch and when his body was discovered. Evidence gathered from the trailer yielded no clues. It is known that Card did not return to his home, the homes of his family members, or the family farm. His exact location and movements after leaving his car have not and likely will never be determined,” commissioners wrote in their report.
A report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security released over the summer suggests that Card, who previously worked at the recycling center, may have planned to ambush employees there.
Months before the massacre, there were numerous warning signs.
Card’s life before 2023 offered few hints of his propensity for violence. He had no felony convictions. In fact, the only item on his criminal history was an OUI charge from 2007, for which he was fined $500, served 48 hours in jail and lost his license for 90 days.
He was repeatedly promoted within the Army Reserve, where he was praised for his leadership, devotion to safety, willingness to help others and his mental toughness. He received a glowing review only six months before the shooting.
But Card’s mental health began deteriorating in the winter before the shooting. By May 2023, his 17-year-old son was so concerned about Card’s “increasingly erratic behavior, anger, and paranoia” that he no longer felt comfortable staying at his father’s house, according to the commission’s report.
Those close to him told investigators that Card’s mental health began to deteriorate not long after he started wearing hearing aids. He claimed to hear people maligning him behind his back. Specifically, Card believed people around him were calling him a pedophile and saying that he was gay.
His family sought to get him help through the Army Reserve, where Card had served since 2003. A Sagadahoc County sheriff’s deputy who spoke with one of Card’s fellow reservists, also an Ellsworth police officer, learned others in the Army Reserve had noticed Card’s changing behavior.
But, as the commission noted, there’s no evidence that anyone in the Army Reserve approached Card about getting help before July, when he went to the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, to instruct cadets on throwing grenades and using other military weapons.
While in West Point, Card continued to claim he heard people maligning him and calling him a pedophile. His fellow reservists tried without success to convince him that wasn’t happening. After he tried to start a fight with a friend, his unit members contacted authorities.
New York state troopers visited Card in his hotel room, where he admitted that his unit members were “scared of me [because they know] I am capable.” In its report, the commission noted that Card didn’t answer when troopers asked him what he was “capable” of.
“They keep saying [expletive] behind my back and I confront them, then they pretend like I’m hearing stuff,” he told the state troopers. “It’s happening everywhere. I’m hearing bits and pieces of it, and it’s getting old.”
After speaking with the troopers, Card was escorted to Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point by three reservists and the troopers. While at the hospital, a doctor concluded he had an “unspecified psychosis.”
Card was then transferred to Four Winds Hospital, a civilian hospital in Katonah, New York, where he would be hospitalized for 19 days. During his intake, Card made reference to having a “hit list.” Card saw some improvement while receiving therapy and taking medication, according to the commission’s report.
Despite his assurances before his release on Aug. 3, Card didn’t continue his treatment, stopped taking medication, and never sought support, the commission found.
A subsequent analysis of his brain found “significant evidence of trauma” that may be related to exposure to “thousands of low-level blasts” during his Army Reserve service. (A partially redacted report from the U.S. Defense Department revealed over the summer that Card had fallen from a ladder, making it another potential source of the brain injuries experts found.)
“While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms,” Dr. Ann McKee of the Boston University CTE Center, which led the exam, said earlier this year.
Since the mass shooting, the Pentagon has issued new guidelines to protect service members from the shockwaves that can cause the trauma found in Card’s brain. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, has asked for a review of the Army Reserve’s suicide prevention and response programs, and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has introduced a bill that would require the military to use state crisis intervention laws if a service member poses a threat to themselves or others.
Doctors, police and the military all missed opportunities to intervene and potentially stop the shooting.
We can never know for certain whether the tragedy in Lewiston could have been prevented. But over the past year, we’ve learned that doctors, police and the military all missed opportunities to intervene in Card’s downward spiral.
Family and friends warned of the danger he posed, but have said again and again that those warnings went unheeded. In September, Gov. Janet Mills blasted both police and the Army Reserve for “negligence” in their dealings with Card.
“At its core, this tragedy was caused by a colossal failure of human judgment by several people, on several occasions, a profound negligence that, as the commission rightly stated, was an abdication of responsibility,” Mills said after reviewing the report into the shooting.
In its report, the commission noted that doctors who evaluated Card at the hospitals in New York made numerous recommendations to his superiors, including that they ensure he goes to follow-up appointment, encourage him to secure his weapons and restrict his access to military weapons and ammunition. But, as investigators found, Army Reserve superiors “neglected” to follow those recommendations and even “ignored” them.
Army Reserve officials told the commission that they had limited authority over Card’s civilian life.
But commissioners wrote that Army Reserve officials didn’t take steps that could have kept Card on active duty and prolonged his hospitalization in August 2023.
The commission found that the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office missed an opportunity to invoke Maine’s yellow-flag law or could have tried to get Card committed to a hospital involuntarily to get him mental health help. Nor did a sheriff’s deputy conduct a follow-up welfare check on Card when he didn’t respond to the officer’s home visit in September. The commission noted that the deputy downplayed Card’s mental health decline.
But the sheriff’s office has defended its response to alarms about the threat Card posed. In testifying to the commission earlier this year, two deputies faulted the Army Reserve, saying a delayed report about Card slowed efforts to find him and that if they had known of “more specific threats” they may have acted “differently.”
That echoed a report the sheriff’s office commissioned in late 2023 that concluded deputies acted appropriately based on what they knew and that the Army Reserve had downplayed warnings about Card.
Even doctors at the Army hospital where Card was initially brought in July 2023 missed an opportunity to invoke laws in New York that could have led to Card surrendering his guns or police seizing them. But, the commission found, they mistakenly believed those laws, the SAFE Act and an extreme risk protection act, also known as a red-flag law, only applied to New York residents.
Despite the numerous missteps and failures the commission found and the strong words from the governor and others, few people have faced discipline or punishment.
In July, three Army Reserve officers were disciplined. Those officers weren’t identified, and it’s unclear what discipline they received, except that it may prevent further advancement within the military.
No law enforcement officer in Maine has been disciplined, though individual officers have faced strong public criticism. The closest any may come to an official rebuke will be when voters in Sagadahoc County decide whether incumbent Joel Merry or Sgt. Aaron Skofield should lead their sheriff’s office.
It’s a stark contrast with the response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers and wounded 17 others in May 2022.
In the year after the massacre, the school district fired its police chief, who also resigned his City Council seat; the district suspended its police department; the school’s principal was placed on administrative leave before eventually being reinstated; the district’s superintendent resigned; and two state troopers were fired, while a third resigned, according to the Texas Tribune.
But the search for justice will continue now that the official inquiries are over. Families of the victims and survivors announced last week that they plan to sue the U.S. Defense Department, Army Reserve and Keller Army Community Hospital for their failures to intervene.
“It is difficult to conceive of a case in which Army personnel could have more warning signs and opportunities to intervene to prevent a service member from committing a mass shooting than what happened in the case of Army Reservist Robert Card,” read legal notices served to the U.S. government.
The shooting has put gun control back in the spotlight here.
During the height of his psychosis, Card’s family, friends and doctors were concerned about his access to guns.
Card had about a dozen guns, according to the commission’s report. In the months before the shooting, he legally purchased a .308 Ruger SFAR rifle with a scope and laser, a 9 mm Beretta pistol and a silencer.
The shooting spurred a slate of gun legislation in Augusta and even prompted U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine’s 2nd District, to come out in favor of an assault weapon ban. Congress has passed no such ban.
This past state legislative session saw a few major policy changes, including a 72-hour waiting period that’s been widely opposed by gun sellers and gun-rights groups, such as the Sportsman’s Alliance of Maine.
Lawmakers also passed expanded background checks covering all advertised gun sales but exempting transfers between family members.
But other measures failed to pass. Mills vetoed a bump-stock ban, calling it “broad” and “ambiguous” and citing an expected ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on a Trump administration ban on bump stocks. That ban was implemented after a gunman used a bump stock to carry out a massacre at a country music festival in Las Vegas in October 2017. The Supreme Court struck down that ban over the summer.
A red-flag law — which allows families to petition a judge to take away a relative’s guns when they pose a danger to themselves and others — didn’t make it into law. Instead, lawmakers modified elements of Maine’s yellow-flag law, which allows law enforcement to temporarily seize someone’s guns when they pose a threat to themselves and others. Since the Lewiston shooting, police have used the yellow-flag law 15 times more often than between its passage in 2019 and October 2023.
That’s not the last word, however, on a red-flag law. A campaign is underway to get enough signatures to put the question to voters as early as next year. In order to appear on the ballot, supporters need to get at least 68,000 signatures by January.
A year later, the healing and honoring of victims continues.
While the political ramifications continue to play out, the community, friends and families are left to pick up the pieces and make sense of the shooting.
There have been small memorials to honor individual victims such as Lucy Violette, who spent more than 50 years working with Lewiston’s public schools, and Joe Walker and Tricia Asselin, whose names are preserved on two Auburn ballfields.
For others, such as the owners of Just-In-Time Recreation, trudging ahead has been part of the healing process. Owners Samantha and Justin Juray became determined to reopen after receiving an outpouring of support from the community. The alley reopened in May.
“You’re the reason,” Justin Juray told the 300-strong crowd that turned out for the reopening. “You’re the reason we’re here.”
The other business targeted by the gunman, Schemengees Bar and Grille, has yet to reopen. Kathy Lebel, who co-owned the business with her husband, David, told The Associated Press in January she wanted to reopen, but it would have to be at a new location.
It’s unclear how plans to reopen will be affected by the death of David Lebel in August.
The former location of Schemengees is finding new life as a warming center and food pantry. Kaydenz Kitchen is repurposing the building and began moving in earlier this month. It was scheduled to open on Nov. 15.
