Police, military failed to prevent Lewiston shooting, worst mass shooting on US soil in 2023, report says

Failures. The police and the Army Reserve in the US state of Maine are responsible for failing to prevent the worst mass shooting in the country in 2023, which left 18 dead, an independent commission accused on Tuesday, August 20. Armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Robert Card opened fire on October 25 in a bowling alley in Lewiston, then about ten minutes later, in a bar-restaurant in this city of 36,000 inhabitants in the northeastern United States, killing 18 people and injuring 13.

“The commission unanimously concluded that on many occasions the course of the tragic events could have been changed.” last October, former Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Daniel Wathen, who heads a seven-person independent body that investigated for months and released a report released Tuesday by the Boston Globe.

The killer, who later committed suicide, suffered from severe mental illness to the point that one of his colleagues feared he would “loses his temper” and does not commit a “mass killing”according to initial reports released in late October by the major newspaper in Boston, the historic city in this region of New England. Robert Card had become paranoid, “heard voices” and had stored up to 10 or 15 rifles at his brother’s house, his former wife had told law enforcement.

The Wathen Commission report accuses the local sheriff’s office of failing to place him in preventive detention or confiscate his firearms. As for the Army Reserve from which he came, it “failed in his duty to take the necessary measures to reduce the threat he posed”. Particularly because of its “hallucinations, his increasingly aggressive behavior, his collection of firearms and his unequivocal comments about his intentions”.