(Portland) Thousands of pages of Maine Department of Public Safety documents released Friday include detailed descriptions of the chaos and carnage surrounding the state’s deadliest shooting.
Police arrived at the two shooting locations in Lewiston in October 2023 without knowing if the shooter was still there. Living and dead victims were lying on the ground. A police officer says desperate survivors were screaming for help as he had to search for the shooter.
“They are grabbing our legs and trying to stop us and we can’t help them,” wrote Lewiston Police Officer Keith Caoueutte. We have to move on and keep looking and hope that they will be alive when we return. »
Another police officer’s first instinct was to think that an act of terrorism had been committed. An impression reinforced by the strong police presence and the flashing blue lights. “I really felt like we were at war,” wrote Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin.
PHOTO MATT ROURKE, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Part of the large police deployment during the 2023 shooting in Lewiston.
Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and bar where 18 people were killed and 13 others injured are included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday by the Maine Department of Public Safety, U.S. responding to freedom of information requests from the Associated Press and other news organizations.
AP journalists had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website containing the documents went down Friday afternoon. State officials said the documents would be available again Monday.
Among the details included in the report were the words of a note left by the shooter, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted “to be left alone.” indicated the “Portland Press Herald”. The note also contained the password to his phone and the passwords needed to access his various accounts.
The shooter’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he suffered a nervous breakdown in the months before the Oct. 25, 2023, shooting.
Robert Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property near Lisbon. The autopsy concluded that he committed suicide.
After the shooting, the Legislature passed new gun laws for Maine and expanded funding for emergency mental health care.