The quiet town of Lewiston was added this Wednesday night to the list of American place names – from Uvalde to Parkland, from Columbine to Sandy Hook – forever associated with the tragic epidemic of gun violence. A reserve soldier named Robert Card, a 40-year-old shooting instructor with a history of mental health problems, killed at least 18 people in two mass shootings, one at a bowling alley where a children’s tournament was being held and the other , in a popular restaurant with billiards and darts. The attacks also left 13 injured.
With about 40,000 inhabitants, Lewiston is the second city in Maine, a sparsely populated state in the northeast of the country. This Thursday dawned, along with much of Androscoggin County, turned into a ghost town. The killer, described in a morning press conference at City Hall by Democratic Governor Janet Mills as an “armed and very dangerous” guy, fled after the massacre, and was still alive almost 24 hours later. without any trace of him.
The police asked (but did not order) residents not to leave their homes and to take extreme precautions. The warning was extended in the afternoon to the southern part of neighboring Sagadahoc county. The streets of the towns where the events took place, Lewiston and Lisbon, seemed like something out of a post-apocalytic movie with a handful of poorly paid extras: a mix of homeless people, clueless drug addicts and rough men, not fond of doing what others told them. they say. Guys like Al, who floated a theory about Card’s whereabouts while he was refueling his truck. “He is very far from here, lost in a forest. I’m not afraid; “I am also armed.”
Journalists from all over the country met at dawn at the epicenters of the tragedy, whose access was blocked by the heavily armed police. From the Spare Time Recreation bowling alley, where Card burst in shortly before 7:00 p.m. armed with a military-style rifle equipped with a scope and took the lives of seven people, to the Schemenggees Bar & Grille, where he killed another eight. Dozens of agents from various local, state and federal agencies, including 80 FBI personnel, fanned out across a vast wooded area, already dyed by the colors of fall, a serious matter in this part of the world, where finding someone with resources for the escape seemed like an almost impossible mission. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard patrolled the Kennebec River.
Between one point of the massacre and another, Card drove a white SUV through streets of single-family homes once he had finished the first part of his mission. About six kilometers and 10 minutes by car separate both places. Melissa Holmes, a neighbor of the bowling alley, was picking up one of her three children from a nearby gym when it all happened. She didn’t hear the shots. “It could have been any of them,” she recalled, even with the shock in her body at the door of her house on a street of run-down houses. “I can’t believe this is happening here; You always watch on television when it happens somewhere else, and you pray for those people; Now we need you to pray for us. And let them find that bastard as soon as possible so that we can begin our collective mourning.”
Near the Schemengees, Laurie Ford, who opened her house so journalists and police could use the bathroom (“that’s what we do in Maine, help each other”), explained that she knew three of the eight identified victims. (The names of the other 10 have not yet emerged from an investigation conducted with extreme caution by local authorities). “This is a small community with strong ties,” Ford added. She was almost convinced that Joe Walker, the restaurant’s manager, who tried to confront the killer with a knife, and Ron Morris, “an old friend from many years ago,” were at the bar together. The third, one of her colleagues from the parcel company where she works, died at the bowling alley.
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Those injured in the massacre were taken to the hospital in the city center, to which the police prevented access. Three of the victims did not survive that night. About five kilometers away, in Lisbon, the road was also closed around the place where Card hastily abandoned his car to continue his escape.
The authorities’ investigations focused at first on that area, and, as the day went by, also on Bowdoin, where the fugitive’s parents and siblings live, of whom more details became known as the hours passed. His colleagues in the Army began to notice worrying behavior in the summer, which they reported. He spent two weeks in psychiatric treatment, until he was left unsupervised. In April he had opened a Twitter account (now
In addition, he was a shooting instructor, an experience that turned him into a killer with terrifying skill on Wednesday. With its low population density, outdoor lifestyle and passion for hunting, Maine is one of the easiest states to buy a gun. They can be carried in public, and there is no pre-screening for someone to purchase one, even if it is a military-style assault rifle like the one Card used, or if that person has a history of mental health or emotional problems. gender violence.
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