Police and Army Reserves in the US state of Maine are responsible for failing to prevent the country’s worst mass shooting of 2023 that left 18 people dead, an independent commission charged Tuesday.
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 there were many opportunities to change the course of the tragic events” of last October, former Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Daniel Wathen, who heads an independent seven-person body that investigated for months and released a report released Tuesday by the Boston Globe, told reporters.
The killer, who later committed suicide, suffered from significant mental illness to the point that one of his colleagues feared he would “lose his cool” and commit a “mass killing,” according to initial accounts revealed at the end of October by the major newspaper in Boston, the historic city in this region of New England.
Robert Card had become paranoid, “hearing voices” and stored as many as 10 or 15 guns at his brother’s house, his estranged wife 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 its duty to take the necessary measures to reduce the threat he represented.” In particular because of his “hallucinations, his increasingly aggressive behavior, his collection of firearms and his unequivocal comments about his intentions.”
In total, seven people died in the bowling alley, eight in the bar-restaurant and three injured people died in hospital. Those killed ranged in age from 14 to 76, including a father and son and an elderly couple.
Police recovered three firearms, two near Card’s body and one in his car nearby. All had been purchased legally because he had never been hospitalized for mental illness.