Blair was this Friday morning “dedicated to his business” in the lush forest on the banks of the Androscoggin River near the sleepy municipality of Lisbon (Maine), when he heard “something that sounded like a gunshot.” He told it shortly after from inside his car, before noting with a trembling gesture, as if he wanted to give value to his impression, that he is a “gun owner.” He ran to take shelter inside a metal structure. He didn’t need to call the police.
The warning was given by one of the helicopters that fly tirelessly over the area surrounding the place where he found on Wednesday night the white SUV used by the soldier in the Robert Card reserve to carry out a massacre with a semi-automatic rifle in a bowling alley and a restaurant in neighboring Lewiston, two places four miles apart. He killed 18 people and injured 13 others. The identity of all the victims is not yet known, but almost all of them are residents of this city of about 40,000 inhabitants, the second most populated in the depopulated State of Maine, in the northeast of the country. This Friday afternoon, almost 48 hours later, they still had not found him.
Lewiston, Lisbon and several other towns in this rural area dedicated to fishing and hunting remain confined waiting for hundreds of local, county, state and federal agents to manage to “hunt him”, in the jargon of the authorities: they are looking for him on land and also under water and from the air. It is not clear that he is alive, but if he was, they repeat tirelessly, he is an “armed man who is very dangerous.” The fact that the suspect is on the run makes this an unusual mass shooting.
Police SUVs and several combat trucks were quickly deployed to search the area where Blair received the scare of her life, but they did not find the murderer. Ryan McGee, Lisbon police chief, soon deemed the deployment unsuccessful. “We are following dozens of leads, we will move our efforts to another location,” he told reporters.
A couple of kilometers away, the frogmen were wading into the water at a bend in the Androscoggin, which flows magnificently at this point in October. Mike Sauschuck, of the county Department of Public Safety, had already warned during the morning press conference at Lewiston City Hall: the plan is for divers to comb those waters, with the assistance of small planes and helicopters, in search of “possible bodies.”
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Sauschuck, who became the official spokesman for the tragedy, appeared before a panel with maps of the three hot spots of the investigations: the aforementioned bend, the bowling alley area and the restaurant. He asked for patience from his neighbors and those who long for the return of normality to the last two places. “We will not stop considering them ‘crime scenes’ until we have investigated the last shell casing of ammunition.” Card used a military-style assault rifle with a scope, a weapon characterized by its ability to fire hundreds of bullets in a matter of seconds.
The farewell note
The official did not give much more information, nor did he want to go into evaluating one of the main hypotheses, that Card has been dead for hours, and that the “manhunt” is actually the search for a corpse. After all, Sauschuck confirmed, the guy left his son a farewell note whose content has not yet been revealed, although CNN reported that in it he promised that he would not be “found alive.” Of course, then it would make no sense for the authorities to have maintained this Friday for the third consecutive day the request to residents not to leave their homes and to remain in them or in their cars with the locks on.
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Susan Rowland, who lives near where Card abandoned his SUV and drove by with his daughters that sleepless night because “a helicopter kept pointing its spotlights at the backyard,” points to another theory. She believes that the suspect’s military training and “the fact that he knows these forests very well” will have allowed him to escape “far away.” “If he could kill all those people and leave the perimeter, I don’t think he’d still be here, frankly,” he added this Friday from the threshold of his house.
In this case, so much uncertainty has disrupted the ritual of the usual that unfolds every time there is a mass shooting in the United States; So far this year, there have been 567, of which, Lewiston has proven to be the deadliest. First, any locality emerges from anonymity and becomes synonymous with terror. Then come the condolences, the “thoughts and prayers,” the sterile debate on gun control, the Republicans’ parapet behind the Second Amendment, and the breadcrumb-based revelations about the killer’s motivations. , which usually meets one of these endings: he commits suicide, is killed by agents, or is arrested at the scene.
The confinement has also prevented the relatives of the victims, who attend the media via Zoom, from organizing vigils and beginning collective mourning to be able to leave it behind as much as possible. Seven (six men and one woman) died at the bowling alley, and eight men died at the restaurant. Three succumbed to their injuries in the hospital that island night. The ages of the victims range from 14 to 76 years old, according to the chief medical officer of the Lewiston hospital. The authorities did not want to give any names, although some have been leaked in the media. Among the dead are a father and son, a deaf language interpreter known for his work for local politicians, the manager from the restaurant or a bowling teacher. It appears the suspect frequented both locations.
That Card is still on the run not only has the inhabitants of this part of Maine in suspense, with its low population density and its outdoor lifestyle, one of the states where it is easiest to buy a gun, It has also refreshed some past traumas. The experience of walking through the streets of Lewiston or Bowdoyn is like a trip back in time to the spring of 2020, during the first weeks of the pandemic. Bowdoyn, 25 kilometers from the places of the massacre, is the place of the suspect’s last residence, where on Thursday night another false alarm led to the belief that he was barricaded in one of the houses in the town.
Shauschuck himself acknowledged that it is not clear how long they will be able to maintain this exceptional situation, with schools, shops and restaurants closed. This Friday, life timidly returned to some of those stages, still predominantly empty. But until further notice, Halloween celebrations have been suspended for next Tuesday night.
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