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The manhunt for the Lewiston mass shooting suspect is over. The long road to recovery is just beginning.
Families are mourning the loss of 18 loved ones, and trying to navigate the unimaginable and unfair reality of life without them. Thirteen people were also injured in the shooting, some of whom remain hospitalized. Our fellow Mainers are working to heal from grievous wounds, both physical and emotional, that will be neither quick nor easy to mend.
In short, they need our help. They deserve our help. And thankfully, in many ways, people across the state and around the country are already stepping up to support them. Donations have poured into GoFundMe pages benefiting victims and their families. Relief funds have sprung up to pool and distribute resources to our neighbors in need.
This must continue as long as the challenges continue for those victimized by this unspeakable tragedy. It is what the victims deserve, and as we’re increasingly learning, what they would be doing for others if the situation were different.
Madawaska native Ben Dyer is one of the surviving victims. He had to be placed on a ventilator after being shot at Schemengees Bar and Grille, where he was playing cornhole. His sister started a GoFundMe campaign to support his recovery, and in only a few days more than 1,000 donations have totaled around $100,000. She expressed gratitude for the outpouring of support and said it is a reflection of the kind of person her brother is.
“He’s a person that would give you his shirt,” Dyer’s sister, Emily Braley, told BDN reporter Christopher Bouchard. “If you need someone, he would jump up and say ‘What do you need? How can I do it?’ He’s just one of those people.”
In a Monday update, Braley said that Dyer was out of intensive care but “has a long road ahead of him.”
Please think about Ben Dyer, and all the other victims. And if you are financially able, be that person jumping up to help those harmed by this horrific event. Be one of those people every day, regardless of whether tragedy has struck. Life is too short to be anything but good to each other.
The sheer loss that victims’ families are enduring cannot be quantified in monetary terms. But there are elements of this tragedy that do have dollar values, whether they be hospital bills, funeral costs, trying to pay a mortgage after the loss of a spouse, or many other heartbreaking — and potentially budget breaking — costs. These individuals and these families must not bear these burdens alone.
The Mills administration has compiled a resource page on the state website with various ways to support victims and their families. These include but are not limited to the city of Lewiston’s Families and Victims Fund, United Way of Androscoggin County’s Community Fund and The Central Maine Medical Center Compassionate Care Fund for Trauma Response and Support.
With help from our friend and cartoonist George Danby, the BDN has created a collection of clothing, paper goods and totes to support efforts in the Lewiston area. The collection features Danby’s original art, a poignant rendering of Maine with a heart placed by Lewiston, and all proceeds will go to the Lewiston-Auburn Area Response Fund set up by the Maine Community Foundation.
“I realized that I would have many days to draw other aspects of this terrible tragedy, but for the first image I felt I needed the image of the state,” Danby explained. “And the heart placed in proximity to Lewiston seemed like the perfect image: Simple but also complex in conveying so much upon hearing this sad and horrific news.”
Like the art, the needed and ongoing collective response to the Lewiston shooting will be both complex and simple. It will take compassion. It will take legislation. It will also take money from those able to give.
These have been some of the darkest days in recent memory here in Maine. The ground feels unsteady, and there is much we don’t know. But we know this: In dark times, Mainers help light the way for each other. They do this in big and small ways, however they can.
Another of our BDN colleagues, Troy Bennett, captured this beautifully in a recent story. He highlighted three acts of kindness that he witnessed on an otherwise brutal day last Thursday after the shooting: Motorists offering crackers and Moxie to a young officer working in the midst of a massive manhunt, an elderly couple letting dozens of reporters take over their driveway to observe police activity and a truck driver pulling a stuck van out of a ditch and then refusing payment.
As Bennett movingly said, “This is really who we are.”
It is who we’ve always been, and who we must continue to be for the shooting victims and their families.
