“It’s a shock when all of sudden you see it and there’s a picture of them and they’re dressed in their uniform and there’s our shoes on their feet, it’s fabulous,” said Mike Rancourt, owner of Rancourt and Company.

The Lewiston-based company was asked to create a shoe for all 592 American athletes for the opening and closing ceremonies.

Rancourt leads the company that has been in his family for generations.

“At some point, every person in the company had touched the shoes, one way or another, to finish it, bag it, to clean it, whatever it may be,” Rancourt said. “Every person was involved.”

Polo Ralph Lauren came calling in 2023 and asked Rancourt to come up with a white buck suede design for this year’s Olympics. All of the shoes are handmade in the Lewiston factory.

Rancourt said from start to finish, one pair of shoes could be done in about two days.

This isn’t the first time Rancourt has made footwear for Team USA athletes. They also wore them in Rio, in Tokyo and in Beijing for the Winter Games.

“People around us, people that don’t even know us, coming up and having a conversation with me,” Rancourt said. “Most of it relates to how proud they are to live in a community that produce the Olympic shoes.”

But this year has even more meaning. The mass shooting that happened not far from the factory just 10 months ago shook this community. Eighteen people died and dozens of others were injured in the October 2023 rampage.

“They’ve been saddened by it, and they struggle with it, when it comes to thinking in terms of what it means for our community and families,” Rancourt said.

He said he wants people to know that resiliency is what Lewiston is all about.

“I know that this is something, producing the Olympic shoes is something that will bring the whole community some satisfaction, that Lewiston will continue, it’s resilient, it will be there,” Rancourt said.

That feeling has been felt on the factory floor.

“Most definitely,” said Brian Pare, a shoemaker. “A lot of pride. Not many people know how to do this anymore.”

“In the back of my mind, it represents Lewiston and the good things about Lewiston,” Rancourt said. “And there’s a lot of good things about Lewiston. But this particular event is really a great view of how Lewiston people come together and create this product and enjoy what we do.”

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The request came in a statement issued by the relatives’ lawyers a day after Army officials released a pair of reports about the October shootings. One of the reports said three Army Reserve officers were disciplined in the aftermath of the shootings, which were carried out by a reservist.

The “narrow scope” of the Army reviews and conflicting conclusions in the reports were “troubling” for the families, the attorneys said. They called on Maine’s congressional delegation to push for an investigation by the Inspector General for the Department of Defense into the events leading up to the shootings.

The broader investigation is needed to identify “system failures that caused numerous warning signs to be overlooked” about the shooter, attorneys Travis Brennan and Ben Gideon wrote.

“A DOD IG should be appointed to further investigate, answer outstanding questions, and address the conflicting conclusions between the reports,” they said.

Army officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.

The shootings happened at a bowling alley and at a bar and grill in Lewiston. Robert Card, who was in the midst of a spiraling mental health crisis, killed 18 people, while 13 survived gunshot wounds and 20 others suffered other types of injuries. Card later died by suicide.

An independent commission established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills is also investigating, and its report is expected to be completed this summer.

The reports released Tuesday showed there was “a series of failures by unit leadership,” according to Lt. Gen. Jody Daniels, chief of the Army Reserve. The reports documented that Card boasted that he could kill 100 people with a rifle scope that he bought, and told a health care provider that he decided to quit his job “before he ended up killing someone.”

The reports also recommended procedural changes and new policies to better manage reservists’ mental health. The four members of Maine’s congressional delegation said Tuesday in a joint statement that the Department of Defense should swiftly implement the recommendations.

“While we cannot undo this tragedy, we can do our best to learn from past errors,” they said.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Leein Hinkley, 43, posted bail June 12 after a judge cited delays in finding a court-appointed attorney for removing a probation hold on Hinkley and lowered his bail to $1,500.

Hinkley’s release angered law enforcement officials and the district attorney, who said public safety should outweigh delays in obtaining counsel for a man with a history of violent crimes.

“We recognize that the state needs to fix the lawyer issue but public safety should not be compromised,” District Attorney Neil McLean Jr. said Monday. He described Hinkley as “an extremely dangerous human being.”

Hinkley had served a 15-year sentence for repeatedly stabbing his domestic partner and a bystander who intervened. He was back in custody for choking his current girlfriend when he went before a judge on May 24, McLean said.

District Judge Sarah Churchill set $25,000 bail, then removed a probation hold and lowered the bail amount after Hinkley had spent 2 1/2 weeks in jail without a lawyer.

A Maine State Police tactical team fatally shot Hinkley, who was on a rooftop, early Saturday after the standoff, which began after a person who fought with him apparently died. The gunfire and plumes of smoke during his rampage late Friday and early Saturday brought new anguish to a region that was traumatized by the killings of 18 people at two locations in neighboring Lewiston last fall.

On Monday, the court system took the rare step of issuing a statement defending the judge after public criticism from the district attorney, the Maine Fraternal Order of Police and the Maine State Trooper’s Association.

Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill said the state’s court system will continue to “malfunction” until the state addresses the shortage of lawyers who are willing to represent defendants who are unable to pay for an attorney.

“The lack of appointed counsel in this state is a constitutional crisis,” she wrote. “As a result, every day judges must make extraordinarily difficult decisions, balancing the constitutional rights of the accused with the needs of the public.”

The American Civil Liberties Union of Maine sued two years ago over the state’s system for providing lawyers for indigent clients that historically relied on private attorneys who were reimbursed by the state. A scathing report in 2019 outlined significant shortcomings in Maine’s system, including lax oversight of the billing practices by the private attorneys.

The state is trying to address the problems. Those efforts include creation of a formal public defender system with several taxpayer-funded offices across the state. But it will take time to address the backlog that the ACLU of Maine describes as hundreds of defendants, some of whom have waited weeks or months for an attorney.

In the Auburn case, Hinkley was released from prison last year after serving 15 years of a 20-year sentence. He was still on probation and faced the possibility of going back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence for the old crime, regardless of whether he was convicted of the charges of choking another woman.

The judge initially set bail $25,000 and then reduced it to $5,000 and then $1,500 with a stipulation that Hinkley remain under house arrest and stay away from his victim. He was also prohibited from having a gun, McNeil said. His former girlfriend also had an active protection-from-abuse order in place.

The Maine State Trooper’s Association and Maine Fraternal Order of Police didn’t take a charitable view of the judge’s decision, saying she showed “blatant disregard for the safety of a victim of domestic violence and public safety.”

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Lt. Col. Ryan Vazquez also testified that there were limitations on forcing the gunman, reservist Robert Card, to adhere to a mental treatment plan while in civilian life. Further, he said there was no mechanism for the Army Reserves to seize Card’s civilian weapons or to store them under normal circumstances.

Vazquez, a battalion commander who oversees more than 200 reservists, testified in front of a state commission investigating the Lewiston shootings to answer questions about what Army officials knew about Card prior to the Oct. 25 shooting that killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar and grill.

Fellow Army reservists have said they witnessed the decline of Card’s mental health to the point that he was hospitalized for two weeks during training last summer. One reservist, Sean Hodgson, told superiors Sept. 15: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

Vazquez told the commission on Monday that Card was considered a “low threat” who should be kept away from weapons because of medication he was on after his hospitalization, and there were not indications that he could do something as drastic as commit a mass shooting.

He later learned of Card’s threat in September to “shoot up” the Saco army where his unit was based. Despite that, he said he was limited in what authority he could exert on Card when he was a civilian and not on military duty.

“If they’re not compliant with treatment, I do not have a lot of tools in my toolbox,” he said.

“I think we’re dealing with a person who had a lot of metal challenged going on at the time, and he was deteriorating,” he added. “So for me to predict what he would have done, how he would have done it, I’m way out of my league.”

Vazquez testified in front of an independent commission established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills. The commission has held several public sessions with police and Army officials, victims’ family members, survivors and others to get a fuller picture of the circumstances surrounding the shootings.

An interim report released by the commission in March found that law enforcement should have seized Card’s guns and put him in protective custody weeks before he committed Maine’s deadliest mass shooting. Card died by suicide in the aftermath of the shootings.

Card’s command officer also acknowledged to the independent commission in April that he didn’t take action when the reservist skipped counselor sessions, and didn’t attempt to verify that the shooter’s family took away his guns.
Monday, members of the Lewiston commission acknowledged during Vazquez’s testimony that Card’s Army superiors faced limitations in the months before the shootings.

“We have all come to have an very acute appreciation of the lack of authority the command structure has over the reservists,” said Paula Silsby, a member of the commission and a former United States attorney for the District of Maine.

The shootings are also the subject of a review by the Army Reserves and an investigation by the Army Inspector General. Army officials have indicated the reports could be available early this summer. Vazquez said during Monday’s hearing he was unaware of when the Reserves report is coming out.

An Army health official told the panel last week that another challenge is there are limitations in health care coverage for reservists compared with full-time soldiers.

The Lewiston commission is expected to release its full report about the shootings this summer.

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There are no Army hospitals in New England, and reservists generally don’t qualify for care through Veterans Administration hospitals, so they are likely to use private health care — but such providers are barred from sharing information with the Army command structure without a patient’s permission, said Col. Mark Ochoa, command surgeon from the U.S. Army Reserve Command, which oversees the Psychological Health Program.

Gaps in communication could leave the commander who bears ultimate responsibility for the safety and well-being of soldiers without a full picture of their overall health, his testimony suggested.

Ochoa couldn’t speak to the specifics of the 40-year-old gunman, Robert Card, who killed 18 people and injured 13 others in October in Lewiston, but he gave an overview of services available to soldiers and their families in a crisis.

While there are extensive services available, the Psychological Health Program cannot mandate that a reservist get treatment — only a commander can do that — and Ochoa noted that there can be communication breakdowns. He also acknowledged that soldiers are sometimes reluctant to seek treatment for fear that a record of mental health treatment will hurt their careers.

“Hopefully we’ve demonstrated to the public and to ourselves that this is a complicated and complex process,” Daniel Wathen, the commission’s chair and a former chief justice for the state, said when the session concluded.

The independent commission established by the governor is investigating facts surrounding the shooting at a bowling alley and at a bar and grill. Card’s body was found two days after the shooting. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists told police Card was suffering from growing paranoia in the months leading up to the shooting. He was hospitalized during a psychiatric breakdown at a military training last summer in upstate New York. One reservist, Sean Hodgson, told superiors in September, a few weeks before the attacks: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

In the aftermath, the state Legislature passed new gun laws that bolstered Maine’s “yellow flag” law, which criminalized the transfer of guns to people prohibited from ownership and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

The commission intends to release its final report this summer.

In a preliminary report, the panel was critical of the police handling of removal of Card’s weapons. It faulted police for giving Card’s family the responsibility to take away his weapons — concluding police should have handled the matter — and said police had authority under the yellow flag law to take him into protective custody.

Mental health experts have said most people with mental illness are not violent, they are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators, and access to firearms is a big part of the problem.

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Dyer, a 47-year-old father of two, was shot five times at Schemengees Bar & Grille in Lewiston last October during the deadliest mass shooting in Maine history. He was rushed to a hospital in a game warden’s pickup truck. He still can’t use his right arm.

In the aftermath of a blood-soaked tragedy in which 18 people were killed and many more were wounded at two separate crime scenes, Dyer has watched his state enact a battery of new gun control laws. It is against that backdrop that he and other voters in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District will consider the political future of three-term Congressman Jared Golden.

Golden, a Democrat with a history of supporting gun rights in ways that bucked his party’s orthodoxy, has shifted his position since the Lewiston shooting. A former Marine who served in two wars overseas, he now supports an assault weapons ban. He’s unopposed in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in Maine, but the two Republicans vying to run against him in November have both vowed to defend 2nd Amendment rights more vigorously than he has.

The congressman’s shifting position worries Dyer, who has voted for him before. A gun owner who describes himself as politically independent, Dyer says stricter gun controls hurt law-abiding gun owners.

“The question is, who are you really helping if you make those changes, because it’s not the constituents,” he said. “That platform, AR, every single one of my friends owns a weapon on that platform. They haven’t been used to hurt anybody.”

That may be true of the guns owned by Dyers’ friends, but the same can’t be said for the assault weapon wielded by Lewiston shooter Robert Card.

Golden’s willingness to rethink his position was encouraging to Tammy Asselin, who survived the shooting at a bowling alley in Lewiston with her daughter Toni. She knows it was hard, but said she was “impressed at (Golden’s) strength and willingness to change his stance so quickly in the face of many resistors.”

Asselin supports an assault weapons ban unequivocally.

“There’s no need for such high-powered weapons to be in the hands of anyone except our military and first responders,” she said. “People claim it’s their right to carry, and I’m not opposed to that right, but there’s absolutely no reason on this Earth they can give that gives a reasonable reason for possessing these high-powered weapons.”

In Golden’s 2nd Congressional District, gun ownership for hunting and sport is commonplace. It’s a vast, mostly wooded swath of Maine that stands apart both culturally and politically from the liberal, beachy 1st District based around Portland. Forestry, papermaking and lobster fishing are signature industries in the 2nd, and the state’s moose hunt is a landmark event there every fall.

Golden said he believes an assault weapons ban would have saved lives in Lewiston, but he also knows his home district is a place where the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution matters to people.

“We cannot ignore the fact that gun laws, whether in Maine or elsewhere, must make room for the Constitution,” Golden said. “The Second Amendment is rooted in self-defense and protection of the family and home.”

Golden’s campaign for another term has larger consequences, with Republicans maintaining just a five-seat margin in the House. He was initially elected in 2018 by ranked-choice voting — a historic first for a member of Congress — and has won by about 6 percentage points in the two campaigns since then.

This campaign promises to be a harder fight, in part because of the volatility of the gun issue and in part because of the popularity of former President Donald Trump in the district, said Mark Brewer, a political scientist with the University of Maine. Trump, who’s on the presidential ballot again this year, has won an electoral vote in the 2nd Congressional District by comfortable margins twice.

“You could see it as a positive that (Golden) is able to change his views in response to a traumatic public event that everyone in his district experienced, everyone in the nation experienced,” Brewer said. “On the other hand, the 2nd Congressional District is highly rural, a lot of gun ownership.”

Republican State Reps. Austin Theriault and Michael Soboleski are set to face off in Tuesday’s GOP primary. Both men have vowed to be stronger 2nd Amendment defenders than Golden. Theriault has sent campaign emails to supporters casting Golden as inconsistent on gun rights, and Soboleski has said Maine lawmakers’ proposals for a “red flag” law to identify people who might be a threat before something tragic happens belong “in a paper shredder.”

But some in the district think Golden’s evolution on gun laws is appropriate. Golden came out publicly in favor of an assault weapons ban not long after the Lewiston rampage. He has since said he “would not have voted for” state-level gun law changes Maine Democrats have enacted, such as expanding background checks and creating penalties for illegal gun sales.

Gun control groups have welcomed Golden’s new stance on assault weapons. The Maine Gun Safety Coalition, which advocates for stricter gun laws, has not yet made an endorsement in Golden’s reelection race, but the group’s executive director, Nacole Palmer, said Golden “represents the courage, thoughtfulness, and leadership we hope to see in other candidates.”

In his hometown of Auburn, just miles from where he was shot on Oct. 25, Dyer isn’t so sure. He said the election would be a tough decision for him.

In the meantime, he’s re-learning to shoot guns with his left hand.

“A sick person did a sick thing that day,” Dyer said. “I think a lot of the gun laws they are trying are a reaction and not proactive to the proper situation.”

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Cumberland County Sheriff Kevin Joyce said in a statement Wednesday that he “wholeheartedly” denies all allegations in a Portland police after-action report that suggested his officers had been drinking, had come from a funeral and dispatched themselves without orders.

Joyce said it is unfortunate that he had to defend against “unfounded allegations” that arose after the deadliest mass shooting in state history as officers from across the state headed to Lewiston on Oct. 25, 2023. In the dark, a Cumberland County tactical vehicle nearly crashed into a Portland vehicle near where the gunman’s vehicle was discovered after 18 people were killed at two locations.

Joyce said the driver of the Cumberland County mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle was a police officer who had been on duty in his municipality before reporting to the scene.

The leader of the Portland special response team wrote that he spoke to occupants of the Cumberland County vehicle and smelled “intoxicants.” He reported that they said they had come from a funeral and responded “we don’t know” when asked who dispatched them to the scene. A Portland police spokesperson said Thursday that he had no further comment on the report.

Joyce said in his statement that he was never made aware, until the Portland report surfaced six months after the shooting, of potential misconduct when he was at the police command post on Oct. 25 or in the weeks afterward.

“I am confident that our members responded to the mass casualty event in Lewiston in both a sober and professional manner. I am proud of my staff for their actions and response on that fateful day,” the sheriff said.

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Col. William Ross, the state police chief, said there’s no “overarching policy” on self-dispatching police officers and said that it’s actually a good thing in an active shooter situation such as Lewiston’s, in which police were responding to multiple locations.

“Keep ’em coming. Because that’s what we need,” Ross said. But, he added, it’s important for officers to be disciplined once a command structure is established.

Ross also spoke about how leaks of investigatory details including an early bulletin, which was distributed moments later on social media, and news media reports of a note discovered at the gunman’s home complicated an already difficult search for the shooter.

Law enforcement officials, including Ross, returned for more testimony at the request of an independent commission, which was focusing Friday on problems with police communication and coordination in the fraught hours after Maine’s deadliest mass shooting Oct. 25.

Eighteen people were killed and 13 injured by an Army reservist at a bowling alley and a bar. The shooter, 40-year-old Robert Card, fled in a vehicle that was abandoned in a nearby town.

Chair Daniel Wathen previously noted “disturbing allegations” were contained in a Portland special response team after-action report that criticized officers who were showing up unannounced. That report also included allegations that some officers arrived intoxicated, but the commission said allegations of misconduct should be handled by the agencies themselves.

The commission previously heard testimony from law enforcement officials about that evening, when law enforcement agencies mobilized for a search as additional police officers poured into the region. State police took over coordination of the search for the gunman, who was found dead from suicide two days later.

There were tense moments when law enforcement located the gunman’s vehicle near the Androscoggin River several hours after the shooting.

State police used a cautious approach, angering some officers who wanted to immediately search the nearby woods. Officers without any official assignment began showing up, raising concerns of police firing on one another in the darkness. The arrival of so many officers also contaminated the scene, making it all but impossible to use dogs to track the gunman.

At one point, a tactical vehicle from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office nearly crashed into another tactical vehicle from the Portland Police Department near that scene.

Ross said the fact that so many officers responded to put themselves in harm’s way was a “proud moment,” but he acknowledged that having so many officers arriving from different agencies caused confusion. The problem of well-meaning officers improvising on the fly diminished once a command post was set up, he added.

“As the hours went by, less and less of that happened,” he said. “And then there’s outliers. There will always be someone who operates outside the norm or the command post. And you deal with those things as they come up.”

Ross said the combination of multiple scenes, the gunman’s disappearance and the manhunt made the tragedy different from other mass shootings around the country.

“This is something that I think is very unique,” Ross said.

As for the leaks, Ross said that they were frustrating but that the agency is not focused on trying to find those who leaked information, calling it a “needle in a haystack.” He also noted that leaks are common in large law enforcement actions involving multiple agencies.

The commission investigating the events leading up to the shooting and its aftermath was appointed by the governor and is composed of seven members, including mental health professionals and former prosecutors and judges. Wathen is a former Maine chief justice.

Prior meetings of the panel, which is expected to issue a final report in summer, have focused on victims, Army personnel and members of Card’s family, in addition to law enforcement officials.

Card’s relatives said during a hearing last week that they struggled to get help for him as his mental health declined and his behavior became more erratic. At another hearing, a fellow reservist detailed his attempts to flag Card’s decline for their superiors.

An interim report issued by the panel in March said law enforcement should have seized Card’s guns and put him in protective custody before he committed the shooting.

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Police are not trying to find the leaker, State Police Col. William Ross said, calling it a “needle in a haystack.” However, Ross said, the leak of the bulletin made the police response more difficult at a time when there was already “just a flurry of activity” in Lewiston, where 18 people were killed in October at a bowling alley and a bar.

Ross said the combination of multiple scenes, the gunman’s disappearance and the manhunt made the tragedy different from other mass shootings around the country.

“This is something that I think is very unique,” Ross said.

Ross made the comments while addressing a special commission investigating the police response to the Oct. 25 mass shooting. Problems with police communication and coordination in the fraught hours after Maine’s deadliest mass shooting were under scrutiny Friday from the state-appointed independent commission, which heard testimony from law enforcement sources.

Eighteen people were killed and 13 injured by an Army reservist at a bowling alley and a bar. The shooter, Robert Card, fled the scene in a vehicle that was abandoned in a nearby town.

Well-meaning officers created chaos by showing up without being asked, and officers who are believed to have arrived intoxicated in a tactical vehicle are among the “disturbing allegations” that have come before the commission, Chair Daniel Wathen said last week.

Those details were outlined in an after-action report by police in Portland, which is about a 45-minute drive south of Lewiston. Wathen said some material in the report was outside the scope of the commission’s work and best handled by police supervisors.

The commission previously heard testimony from law enforcement officials about the evening of Oct. 25, when law enforcement agencies mobilized for a search as additional police officers poured into the region. State police took over coordination of the search for the gunman, who was found dead from suicide two days later.

Some of the tense moments came when law enforcement located the gunman’s vehicle several hours after the shooting.

State police used a cautious approach, angering some officers who wanted to immediately search the nearby woods. Officers without any official assignment began showing up, raising concerns of police firing on one another in the darkness. The arrival of so many officers also contaminated the scene, making it all but impossible to use dogs to track the gunman.

At one point, a tactical vehicle from the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office nearly crashed into another tactical vehicle from the Portland Police Department near that scene. A Portland police after-action report suggested the occupants of the Cumberland County vehicle had been drinking, but the sheriff denied that his deputies were intoxicated.

Representatives of the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and Portland Police Department said they weren’t sending officers to testify Friday.

The commission that took testimony Friday was appointed by the governor and is composed of seven members including mental health professionals and former prosecutors and judges. Wathen is a former Maine chief justice.

Former meetings of the panel, which is expected to issue a final report in summer, have focused on victims, Army personnel and members of Card’s family. Card’s relatives said during a hearing last week that they struggled to get help for him as his mental health declined and his behavior became more erratic. At another hearing, a fellow reservist detailed his attempts to flag Card’s decline for their superiors.

An interim report issued by the panel in March said law enforcement should have seized Card’s guns and put him in protective custody before he committed the shooting.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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The commission will hear from Card’s family and an official from the Army Reserves’ Psychological Health Program Thursday, reports News Center Maine.

The testimony is set for 9 a.m. at the University of Maine at Augusta. This will be the 11th public meeting of the commission, according to News Center Maine.

Card, 40, opened fire at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston on Oct. 25, 2023, killing 18 people and injuring 13 others. This was the deadliest shooting in Maine history.

The 40-year-old’s body was found two days after the shootings in a nearby town. The medical examiner concluded that he died by suicide.

Family members had concerns about Card’s behavior before the shooting. They reported that he was paranoid and delusional, winding up in a hospital for two weeks during training with other reservists at West Point.

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The Maine Senate failed to muster a two-thirds majority to override the veto on the gun bill, something sought by gun safety advocates 18 people were killed in a shooting in Lewiston, while the House failed to override the veto of the farmworkers’ minimum wage bill.

In the end, all eight of Gov. Janet Mills’ vetoes were upheld, including proposals to create a higher income tax for wealthy Mainers and to end a “three strikes” law on thefts.

But lawmakers were expected to stay late into the night to address spending proposals that the Democratic governor warned could push the budget “to the breaking point.”

The new bills to be considered would provide more money for free health clinics, African American and Wabanaki studies in schools and the establishment of a civil rights unit in the attorney general’s office. Other initiatives would provide one-time relief for blueberry growers and provide free entry to state parks to Indigenous people, among other things.

The governor’s original budget set aside about $100 million to offset anticipated difficulties in the next budget cycle but lawmakers ended up spending much of that.

The proposed new spending was about $12 million but the total impact is more than $33 million, according to the Department of Administrative and Financial Services. The bills would reduce the general fund and transfer money from special revenue accounts such as the Fund for Healthy Maine and Bureau of Insurance, the department said.

A spokesperson for the governor issued a statement accusing the appropriations committee of employing “budget gimmicks like stripping fiscal notes, delaying effective dates, and raiding other special revenue accounts to spend more, which the governor previously warned them not to do and which will push the state budget to the breaking point.”

The Legislature’s Republican leaders issued a statement accusing Democrats of recklessness in spending. “In a few short years, Democrats will turn a record-breaking surplus into a deficit,” said John Bott, spokesperson for House Republicans.

The governor’s objections to the farm worker minimum wage center on a provision allowing workers to sue their employers.

As for bump stocks, she said she agreed with efforts to restrict devices that can convert a regular rifle into the functional equivalent of a machine gun but she objected to the bill that she said relied on “broad and ambiguous language.”

Though that bill failed, the governor signed several other gun safety bills including background checks on private gun sales, waiting periods for gun purchases, criminalizing gun sales to prohibited people and strengthening the state’s yellow flag law.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Six weeks before Robert Card killed 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston, his best friend and fellow reservist Sean Hodgson texted their supervisors, telling them to change the passcode to the gate at their Army Reserve training facility and arm themselves if Card showed up. The Lewiston killings happened Oct. 25 – exactly six months prior to Thursday’s hearing.

“I grieve every day for the many lives that are lost for no reason and those that are still affected today,” Hodgson said prior to testifying Thursday.

Hodgson told superiors on Sept. 15: “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.” That message came months after relatives had warned police that Card had grown paranoid and said they were concerned about his access to guns.

The failure of authorities to remove guns from Card’s possession in the weeks before the shooting has become the subject of a monthslong investigation in the state, which also has passed new gun safety laws since the tragedy.

Card also was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for two weeks in July, and the Army barred him from having weapons while on duty. But aside from briefly staking out the reserve center and visiting Card’s home, authorities declined to confront him. He was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound two days after the shootings.

In an interim report released last month, the independent commission launched by Gov. Jane Mills concluded that the Sagadahoc County sheriff’s office had probable cause under Maine’s “yellow flag” law to take Card into custody and seize his guns. It also criticized police for not following up with Hodgson about his warning text.

On Thursday, another fellow reservist, Daryl Reed, said told the commission he witnessed firsthand the mental and physical decline of a colleague who went from a “normal guy” who traded stocks and loved hunting and being outdoors to becoming paranoid and believing others were calling him a pedophile.

Card also acquired expensive night vision equipment that he said he used for hunting, Reed said. Reed said fellow reservists started to become concerned Card could become a danger to colleagues, and they informed their superiors.

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In an exclusive series of interviews in January, Hodgson told The AP he met Card in the Army Reserve in 2006 and that they became close friends after both divorced their spouses around the same time. They lived together for about a month in 2022, and when Card was hospitalized in New York in July, Hodgson drove him back to Maine.

Growing increasingly worried about his friend’s mental health, Hodgson warned authorities after an incident in which Card started “flipping out” after a night of gambling, pounding the steering wheel and nearly crashing multiple times. After ignoring his pleas to pull over, Card punched him in the face, Hodgson said.

“It took me a lot to report somebody I love,” he said. “But when the hair starts standing up on the back of your neck, you have to listen.”

Some officials downplayed Hodgson’s warning, suggesting he might have been drunk because of the late hour of his text. Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer described him as “not the most credible of our soldiers” and said his message should be taken “with a grain of salt.”

Hodgson said he struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcohol addiction but said he wasn’t drinking that night and was awake because he works nights and was waiting for his boss to call.

The commission also heard from the state’s director of victim witnesses services, and more Army personnel were expected to testify. Cara Cookson, director of victim services for the Maine Office of the Attorney General, described through tears the daunting task of responding to the enormity of the tragedy with a “patchwork of resources.”

Later Thursday, the Maine Resiliency Center, which provides support to people affected by the killings, planned to hold a six-month commemoration event at a park in Lewiston.

“Our hearts are still healing, and the road to healing is long, but we will continue to walk it together,” Mills said.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and the Democratic-led Legislature pressed for a number of gun and mental health proposals after the shooting that claimed 18 lives and injured another 13 people, despite the state’s strong hunting tradition and support for gun owners.

“Maine has taken significant steps forward in preventing gun violence and protecting Maine lives,” said Nacole Palmer, executive director of the Maine Gun Safety Coalition, who praised lawmakers for listening to their constituents.

The governor’s bill, approved early Thursday, would strengthen the state’s yellow flag law, boost background checks for private sales of guns and make it a crime to recklessly sell a gun to someone who is prohibited from having guns. The bill also funds violence prevention initiatives and opens a mental health crisis receiving center in Lewiston.

The Maine Senate also narrowly gave final approval Wednesday to a 72-hour waiting period for gun purchases and a ban on bump stocks that can transform a weapon into a machine gun.

However, there was no action on a proposal to institute a “red flag” law. The bill sponsored by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross would have allowed family members to petition a judge to remove guns from someone who is in a psychiatric crisis. The state’s current “yellow flag” law differs by putting police in the lead of the process, which critics say is too complicated.

Lawmakers pushed through the night and into the morning as they ran up against their adjournment date, which was Wednesday. But it didn’t come without some 11th-hour drama. Lawmakers had to approve a contentious supplemental budget before casting their final votes and didn’t wrap up the session until after daybreak.

The Oct. 25 shooting by an Army reservist in Lewiston, Maine’s second-largest city, served as tragic backdrop for the legislative session.

Police were warned by family members that the shooter was becoming delusional and had access to weapons. He was hospitalized for two weeks while training with his unit last summer. And his best friend, a fellow reservist, warned that the man was going “to snap and do a mass shooting.” The shooter killed himself after the attack.

Republicans accused Democrats of using the tragedy to play on people’s emotions to pass contentious bills.

“My big concern here is that we’re moving forward with gun legislation that has always been on the agenda. Now we’re using the tragedy in Lewiston to force it through when there’s nothing new here,” said Republican Sen. Lisa Keim. “It’s the same old ideas that were rejected year after year. Using the tragedy to advance legislation is wrong.”

But Democrats said constituents implored them to do something to prevent future attacks. They said it would’ve been an abdication of their responsibility to ignore their pleas.

“For the sake of the communities, individuals and families now suffering immeasurable pain, for the sake of our state, doing nothing is not an option,” the governor said in late January when she outlined her proposals in her State of the State address. Those in attendance responded with a standing ovation.

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The House followed the Senate on Monday in approving the governor’s omnibus gun safety bill that strengthens the state’s yellow flag law, boosts background checks for private sales of guns and makes it a crime to recklessly sell a gun to a prohibited person. The bill also funds violence prevention initiatives and opens a mental health crisis receiving center in Lewiston.

More votes are necessary in the Democratic-controlled Legislature before it adjourns Wednesday. The House also will be voting on two bills approved by the Senate: waiting periods for gun purchases and a ban on bump stocks.

One bill that failed was a proposal to let gun violence victims sue weapon manufacturers. And so far, neither chamber has voted on a proposal for a red flag law that allows family members to petition a judge to remove guns from someone who’s in a psychiatric crisis. That proposal differs from the state’s current yellow flag law that puts police in the lead of the process.

Meanwhile, another measure sponsored by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross to fund a range of mental health and violence prevention initiatives awaits money in the final budget.

The state has a strong hunting tradition and an active lobby aimed at protecting gun owner rights. Maine voters rejected universal background checks for firearm purchases in 2016.

The Oct. 25 shooting that killed 18 people and injured 13 others in Lewiston prompted lawmakers to act, saying constituents were demanding that they do something that could prevent future attacks.

Police were warned by family members of the shooter, an Army reservist who died by suicide, that he was becoming paranoid and losing his grip on reality before the attack. He was hospitalized last summer while training with his Army Reserve unit, and his best friend, a fellow reservist, warned that the man was going “to snap and do a mass shooting.”

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Rep. Michael Lemelin, R-Chelsea, said the mass shooting last October in Lewiston, Maine, that claimed 18 lives and recent storms were God’s revenge for “immoral” laws adopted by legislators, and he described the shield bill as “inspired by Lucifer himself.” Another lawmaker, Rep. Shelley Rudnicki, of Fairfield, announced that she agreed with Lemelin’s remarks.

House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross told Lemelin in a letter that the remarks were “extremely offensive and intentionally harmful to the victims and the families of the Lewiston tragedy, the House of Representatives, and the people of Maine.”

Lemelin and Rudnicki both delivered brief, identical apologies on the House floor, allowing them to resume their ability to speak and vote.

The Maine Senate voted 21-13 in favor of the bill Thursday, after a debate that was shorter than the tense discussion in the House ahead of a 80-70 vote in that chamber late Wednesday evening.

Several House Republicans focused on the underlying law that allows minors to receive abortions and gender-affirming care under certain circumstances. Critics said the bill could lead to kidnapping and trafficking of out-of-state teens.

But Democratic Rep. Sam Zager, D-Portland, said the standards of care laid out for medical providers require a robust process for whether someone has gender dysphoria and is eligible for gender-affirming care.

“This is not somebody whisked away for a weekend making a declaration and having surgery. It is very deliberate and very meticulous and is not done expediently,” said Zager, who is a physician.

The sponsor of the bill suggested lawmakers were getting sidetracked by emotional topics of abortion and gender-affirming care instead of focusing on shielding Maine from out-of-state interference in its affairs. “This bill is about our state’s sovereign ability to set and enforce our laws without interference from Texas, Tennessee or Kentucky,” said Rep. Amy Kuhn, D-Falmouth.

The shield law received final approval from the Maine Legislature on Friday. If signed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, Maine would join more than a dozen states to have such a law.

Abortion is legal in Maine at all stages of pregnancy with a doctor’s approval. And lawmakers last year approved a bill to let 16- and 17-year-olds receive limited gender-affirming care, which does not include surgery, without parental consent.

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Capt. Jeremy Reamer said he understood that the shooter, Robert Card, was suffering from a psychiatric breakdown during training last summer but said he was limited in the level of oversight he could provide after Card returned home and was not actively participating in drills with his Army Reserve unit. More aggressive actions and oversight would have been possible if Card had been a full-time soldier, Reamer said.

Commissioner Toby Dilworth, a former federal prosecutor, grilled Reamer about why he didn’t follow through with someone under his command, including by making sure the shooter attended counseling sessions. At one point, Reamer said an email problem prevented him from seeing a July message pertaining to the gunman’s health until after the Oct. 25 shootings.

Reamer, who gave up control of the Maine-based unit after a routine change of command in February, also defended his decision to rely on a subordinate, an Army reservist who was the Lewiston shooter’s best friend, to serve as a go-between with his family. The reservist, Sean Hodgson, told Reamer that he reached out to the gunman’s family in Bowdoin and that family members agreed to take away his guns after he was hospitalized. Reamer said that as an Army Reserve officer, he had no jurisdiction over the shooter’s personal guns.

“My understanding was that an agreement was made and the family agreed to remove the weapons from the home,” Reamer said. “I just know that the family agreed to remove the firearms,” he added later.

Reamer was called back to testify because his previous testimony was cut short. Other witnesses expected to testify on Thursday include survivors of the shooting, the state’s former chief medical examiner and witnesses who were slated to discuss American Sign Language communication struggles after the shootings.

Appointed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, the independent commission is determining facts around the shooting that claimed 18 lives at a bowling alley and at a bar and grill, both in Lewiston.

In its interim report released last month, the commission concluded that the Sagadahoc County sheriff’s office had probable cause under Maine’s “yellow flag” law to take the shooter into custody and seize his guns because he was experiencing a psychiatric crisis and was a danger to others.

Maine lawmakers are currently debating whether the law, which requires police to initiate the process, should be supplemented with a “red flag” law, which would allow family members or others to directly petition a judge to remove guns from someone in a psychiatric crisis. It’s one of several mental health and gun control measures being considered by the Maine Legislature in response to October’s mass shooting.

The commission’s work is far from complete, Chairman Dan Wathen said last month.

“Nothing we do can ever change what happened on that terrible day, but knowing the facts can help provide the answers that the victims, their families and the people of Maine need and deserve,” he said.

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Testimony stretched into a second day as a legislative committee heard public testimony Tuesday on the proposal that aims to let family members or others petition a judge to initiate the process of temporarily removing someone’s guns during a psychiatric crisis instead of letting police handle the process under the state’s existing “yellow flag” law.

Jill Walker, a licensed clinical social worker whose brother Jason was killed during the mass shooting, delivered an impassioned plea for lawmakers to reject the proposal. She said the yellow flag process is adequate, if used properly.

“I am disturbed that some members of the Maine Legislature have seized the opportunity to nefariously use the Oct. 25 tragedy for a political end,” Walker told the Judiciary Committee. “It’s my personal opinion that this was rushed,” she added.

But a statement read aloud on behalf of Jennifer Zanca, who was shot in the arm while trying to escape the carnage, indicated she believes a red flag law could have made a difference.

“I understand it’s a loaded topic and my friends have different opinions, but this is where I stand: The states that have safe gun laws, including waiting periods, background checks and red flag laws, have the lowest incidence of gun violence. The statistics are clear. It seems reasonable that we put these measures in place because it works,” Zanca’s statement said.

The red flag bill — subject of public testimony on Friday and on Tuesday — is among a number of proposals introduced in response to the Oct. 25 shootings by an Army reservist at a bowling alley and at a bar and grill in Lewiston. The Army and police were aware that the 40-year-old gunman had become paranoid and delusional, leading to his hospitalization. A fellow reservist warned that he might commit a mass shooting.

An independent commission said Maine’s existing law should have been invoked to take the shooter’s weapons. The “yellow flag” law requires police to initiate the process of removing someone’s guns in a crisis by taking them into protective custody, getting them evaluated and presenting findings to a judge. “Red flag” proposals allow an individual to directly go to a judge to initiate the process.

Critics contend someone rights could be trampled by taking police out of the equation.

Kathleen Szostek of Dixfield told the committee that the red flag proposal “lulls us into thinking we’re doing something about gun violence when we’re potentially trampling on the rights of law-abiding citizens.”

“This nation was founded on innocent until proven guilty. This bill is so wrong. Imagine how it could be weaponized in this divided environment,” said Szostek, who contended that the existing law “would work just fine if it was followed.”

Sheldon Bird of Bath took lawmakers to task for inaction on gun violence.

“The basic opening argument against any type of firearm restriction goes like this: ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,'” Bird said. “This is specious at best, fraudulent at worst. If it were valid, then we would have no higher death rate than any other civilized country. Guns are a unique factor in the U.S. violence situation.”

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House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross, a Democrat, said it’s important to reconsider the previously rejected proposal after a gunman killed 18 people last fall amid signs of deteriorating mental health. A competing bill by the Democratic governor would strengthen the state’s existing crisis intervention tool, a so-called “yellow flag” law.

The new proposal, introduced three weeks before lawmakers adjourn, would allow family members to go directly to a judge to request that someone’s guns be removed during a psychiatric crisis.

The state’s current law requires police to start the process by taking someone into protective custody, initiating a case that eventually ends up before a judge. It went into effect in 2020 as a compromise, aimed at simplifying the process by letting police handle it, and an independent commission said it should’ve been used with the Lewiston gunman.

The speaker acknowledged the 11th-hour nature of her proposal but said her constituents have demanded it.

“This bill will ensure that those people who are a risk to themselves and others can receive the help they need, while preventing senseless acts of violence,” Talbott Ross said in a statement.

The red flag bill is among a number of proposals introduced in response to the Oct. 25 shootings at a bowling alley and at a bar and grill in Lewiston. The 40-year-old gunman, an Army reservist, was becoming paranoid and delusional, and was hospitalized while his reserve unit was training in New York. A fellow reservist warned that he might commit a mass shooting.

Gun control advocacy groups rallied around the new proposal on Thursday. A group founded by former congresswoman and shooting survivor Gabby Giffords said the measure would help prevent more mass shootings.

Lawmakers “must look at every opportunity to strengthen Maine’s gun safety laws and fulfill promises made to honor the lives lost in Lewiston with clear action,” said Joe Platte, the group’s state legislative manager.

It’s important for the state to have a “true red flag law,” said Lianna Holden, a volunteer leader with the Freeport High School Students Demand Action chapter.

“The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence is take action before tragedy strikes,” Holden said.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has called for streamlining and strengthening the state’s existing yellow flag law by allowing police to directly petition a judge to remove someone’s guns, keeping police in the lead of the process. She’s also called for boosting background checks for private sales of weapons and bolstering mental crisis care. Other proposals by Democratic leaders include a 72-hour waiting period for most gun purchases and a ban on bump stocks or other modifications that can transform a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.

The Maine Legislature already voted in favor of expanding mental health care in the aftermath of the shooting, but that bipartisan bill is on hold until funding questions are addressed.

The proposed red flag law would allow a member of a person’s family or household, as well as police, to petition for temporary confiscation of guns. A judge would be required to issue an extreme risk protection order on the same day of a determination that someone is “an immediate and present danger.” A hearing would be required to extend the temporary order beyond 14 days.

Republican lawmakers previously accused Democrats of using the Lewiston tragedy to push past proposals rejected by lawmakers in a state that has a strong hunting tradition. They’ve also said the proposals could be unconstitutional, and aren’t supported by the findings of a state panel that investigated the shootings.

That panel, which is still conducting its review, issued an interim report this month that said law enforcement had the ability to seize guns from shooter Robert Card under the state’s existing laws. He was found dead by suicide after the state’s biggest manhunt.

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While legal experts and the man he punched concur on that, they say even if charges had been pursued they might not have prevented the shootings.

An independent commission launched by Gov. Janet Mills has been reviewing events leading up to the Oct. 25 shootings at a bowling alley and bar and the response afterward. Much of its recently released interim report focused on the state’s “yellow flag” law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove somebody’s guns during a psychiatric health crisis.

Criticism particularly focused on Sgt. Aaron Skolfield of the Sagadahoc County sheriff’s office. The panel concluded that office had probable cause under that law to take the gunman into custody and seize his guns, and that its decision to leave the latter up to his family was an abdication of responsibility.

The sheriff’s office did not immediately respon to a request for comment Monday.

However, the report ends with a brief mention of another possible missed opportunity: The shooter’s best friend, Sean Hodgson, reported he was assaulted when his friend started “flipping out” as they returned from a night of gambling, pounding the steering wheel and nearly crashing multiple times. After ignoring his pleas to pull over, the gunman punched him in the face, Hodgson said.

“I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting,” Hodgson wrote in reporting the incident to his U.S. Army Reserve supervisors on Sept. 15.

Hodgson’s commanding officer, 1st Sgt. Kelvin Mote, described the incident in a memo sent to Skolfield later that day. But the commission noted Skolfield never followed up with Hodgson after another Army official told him to take his account “with a grain of salt.”

That was a mistake, according to the commission, which said law enforcement had “more than sufficient information” to pursue assault charges. Had they done so, the Lewiston shooter could have been arrested and a prosecutor could have requested bail conditions that prohibited the possession of firearms, the commission wrote.

“The Commission finds that there is a misperception among some law enforcement officers, including Sgt. Skolfield, that they need to have a victim ‘press charges’ to bring a case to the prosecutor’s office,” the commission wrote. “This is simply wrong. It is the prosecutor … who brings the charges, but a prosecutor can only act when those charged with investigating crimes, i.e., law enforcement officers, follow through with their investigations.”

The gunman, who was found dead by suicide after a two-day search after the shooting, was well-known to law enforcement.

Additionally, his family and fellow service members had raised flags about his behavior, deteriorating mental health and potential for violence earlier.

In a phone interview last week, Hodgson said he agreed there would have been grounds to charge him with assault. But he doesn’t know whether it would have prevented the attack.

“Even though I agree with their assessment, at the same time, I didn’t want to see him in trouble. I wanted him to get some sort of help,” he said.

Arresting the shooter would’ve separated him from the longtime friend he most often turned to for support, he said. But it also could have led to the removal of his guns.

“If they would have pressed charges, they would have cut him off for me,” he said. “But if they did contact me, I could have let them know, and they could have investigated.”

Jim Burke, professor emeritus at the University of Maine School of Law, said it is clear that law enforcement and perhaps military officials didn’t do everything they could have done, including pursuing criminal charges, but the more difficult question is what would have happened if they had done so.

“Could it have made a difference?” he said. “In theory, it could have. In practice, it might have. There is no way I can tell you that it you it would have.”

Burke, who spent 30 years practicing law in Lewiston, said officers can’t arrest someone for simple assault without a warrant unless they witness the crime.

“If the deputy sheriff had taken the story to a court and asked for an arrest warrant, I doubt that they would have gotten the arrest warrant just because a fellow Army buddy said, so-and-so did …. to me,” he said.

And while a victim’s cooperation is not necessary, given the backlog of criminal cases in the Maine judicial system,

“They don’t have the luxury of spending an amount of time on a simple assault where nobody’s complaining,” Burke said.

“In retrospect, it was an incredible – and I’m using the phrase intentionally – red flag. But at the time, they didn’t see it,” he said. “Is that a mistake? Yes. Should they have done differently? Yes.”

Orlando Delogu, also a professor emeritus at the law school, said authorities definitely should have investigated Card for assaulting Hodgson. He also agreed with the commission’s criticism of authorities for not contacting Hodgson to find out where the shooter worked after he refused to answer the door at home. But as the commission noted, the sheriff’s office wasn’t privy to all the information the Army had about the gunman. That’s a big problem, Delogu said.

“The military unit, the state police, the local sheriff’s office and the local police, in Maine, they have a long tradition of not cooperating with one another,” he said.

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Just-In-Time Recreation has been closed since October 25, 2023, when Robert Card Jr. entered the building and opened fire, killing seven and injuring several others in what would become the deadliest U.S. mass shooting of 2023 and the deadliest in Maine history.

Owners Justin and Samantha Juray, who were at the bowling alley the night of the shooting, have spent the months following the incident working to revive the business and recover from the trauma they experienced.

“We still have our moments. We’ll never forget. Loud noises still scare us. We look for exits when we go into every place that we go into,” Justin Juray, who was bowling with his father at the time of the shooting, told News Center Maine. “Nothing will ever change what happened, and we can’t go backwards, but we can move forward.”

In an attempt to move forward, the Jurays reinvented the space with updated flooring, computer systems and ball returns.

They’ve also worked to find a balance between implementing new safety measures, like security cameras and a new door, and maintaining the family-friendly atmosphere they seek to promote.

“We are trying. But other than metal detectors and an armed guard, I mean, how do we stop that? That’s letting our freedoms go at that point,” Justin Juray, who was bowling with his father the night of the shooting, told News Center Maine. “That’s not welcoming. Who feels good about seeing an armed guard at the door of a bowling center, a family-fun center? That’s not Maine, not America. That’s not normal.”

The couple said they’re hoping to welcome guests back to the lanes this spring and thank the community that has supported them over the last few months.

“We couldn’t have done this without all the help that we’ve gotten,” Justin Juray said. “[Our community] carried us through. I can’t wait to open.”

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Sgt. Aaron Skolfield of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office is running as a Republican against his boss, Sheriff Joel Merry, who is a Democrat.

Skolfield was criticized in a report last week from a commission that looked into events preceding the deadliest mass shooting in Maine history, in which Robert Card killed 18 people in a bowling alley and a restaurant in Lewiston.

Five weeks before the Oct. 25 shooting, Skolfield responded to a call that the gunman was suffering from a mental health crisis.

A commission convened by the governor and attorney general to review the facts of the shooting found that Skolfield should have realized he had probable cause to start the state’s “yellow flag” process, which can be used to remove guns from a potentially dangerous person.

Neither Skolfield nor Merry responded to calls seeking comment about the commission’s report last week, and neither responded to calls Tuesday about the election. Both men defended the sheriff’s office’s actions during a January hearing in front of the commission.

During the hearing, Skolfield described himself as “just a simple street cop” who responded to the shooter’s home in September. He said the Lewiston gunman “wouldn’t come out, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t communicate.”

However, the Lewiston commission’s report stated that Skolfield “made only limited attempts to accomplish a ‘face-to-face’ meeting with Mr. Card.” The report also stated that Skolfield “failed to consult the agency’s records concerning a previous complaint about Mr. Card” and “failed to follow up on leads to determine how to contact Mr. Card,” among other criticisms.

The filing with the state about Skolfield’s bid for county sheriff contains only limited information. It states that he registered on Feb. 12, a couple of weeks after testifying before the Lewiston commission. It also says he has appointed a treasurer and is using traditional campaign financing. The election is this year.

Skolfield’s testimony in January came during one of several public sessions held by the commission. He and other law enforcement officials expressed frustration with implementing the state’s yellow flag law during the sessions.

The commission is expected to provide a full report of its findings this summer.

The Lewiston gunman, an Army reservist, was found dead by suicide after a two-day search following the shootings. He had been well known to law enforcement before the killings, and the extent to which the shootings could have been prevented has been an intense source of scrutiny in the months since.

In May, relatives warned police that the shooter had grown paranoid, and they expressed concern about his access to guns. He was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for two weeks in July after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room.

In August, the Army barred the gunman from handling weapons while on duty and declared him nondeployable. In September, a fellow reservist texted an Army supervisor about his growing concerns about him, saying, “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey assembled the commission to review both the events leading up to Oct. 25, when Army reservist Robert Card killed 18 people in a bowling alley and a bar, and the response to the tragedy.

Led by a former chief justice of Maine’s highest court, the commission also included a former U.S. attorney and the former chief forensic psychologist for the state. It held seven sessions starting in November, hearing from law enforcement, survivors and victims’ family members and members of the U.S. Army Reserve as it explored whether anything could have been done to prevent the tragedy and what changes should be made going forward.

Card, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot after a two-day search, was well known to law enforcement, and his family and fellow service members had raised flags about his behavior, deteriorating mental health and potential for violence before the shootings.

In May, relatives warned police that Card had grown paranoid, and they expressed concern about his access to guns. In July, Card was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for two weeks after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons while on duty and declared him nondeployable. And in September, a fellow reservist texted an Army supervisor about his growing concerns about Card, saying, “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

But law enforcement officials told commission members that Maine’s yellow flag law makes it difficult to remove guns from potentially dangerous people.

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“I couldn’t get him to the door. I can’t make him open the door,” said Sgt. Aaron Skolfield, who visited Card’s home for a welfare check in September. “If I had kicked in the door, that would’ve been a violation of the law.”

In later testimony, those involved in the search for Card in the shooting’s aftermath acknowledged potential missed opportunities to find him and end the search that locked down the community and terrified residents. Some of the most emotional testimony came from family members who tearfully described scenes of blood, chaos and panic followed by unfathomable loss.

Rachael Sloat, who was engaged to be married to shooting victim Peton Berwer Ross, told the committee that her heart breaks every time their 2-year-old daughter asks for her daddy.

“Where are you?” she said. “Every politician, every member of law enforcement, every registered voter in the country – I want you to hear those words. ‘Where are you?’ Because my fellow Americans, where are you? We failed my little girl.”

Boston University researchers who analyzed a sample of Robert Card’s brain tissue said Wednesday they found evidence of traumatic brain injury. The analysis, requested by the Maine medical examiner, found degeneration in the nerve fibers allowing communication between different areas of the brain, inflammation and small blood vessel injury, according to Dr. Ann McKee of the university’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center.

The Lewiston shooter had been an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where it is believed he was exposed to repeated low-level blasts. It is unknown if that caused his brain injury and what role the injury may have played in his declining mental health before he opened fire at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston on Oct. 25.

McKee made no connection between the injury and the gunman’s violent actions.

“While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms,” McKee said in a statement released by the Card family.

Dr. Alexandra Filippakis, a neurologist who has treated members of the military and others for traumatic brain injuries, said Thursday she would not conclude brain injury played a role in the Maine shooter’s behavior based on McKee’s description of her findings.

“TBI is a very broad diagnosis, and it looks different in different people. Not everybody has the same symptoms. Not everybody has the same severity of symptoms,” Filippakis said. “There’s no way that you could, with certainty, link that to a particular action.”

Filippakis, who works at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire, said the connectivity damage McKee described is common and can have many causes, including aging, high blood pressure and smoking.

“That could mean so many different things,” she said. “You certainly can’t draw any conclusions from that piece of information.”

But James Stone, a University of Virginia radiologist who has studied repeated low-level blast exposure in the military, said changes to the Lewiston gunman’s brain “seemed pretty profound.”

Such injuries can affect impulse control and emotional regulation, he said, and though he doesn’t know if those parts of his brain were affected, “it’s certainly hard to imagine that the level of brain changes that we’re seeing in some way did not contribute to his behavior.”

Chris Dulla, a professor and interim chair of neuroscience at Tufts School of Medicine, said he was surprised that researchers found no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which has plagued many professional football players.

“It doesn’t seem to be as cut and dry,” he said. “What that speaks to is how varied traumatic brain injuries are, and how difficult they can be to diagnose, even in the postmortem brain sample, when you can study every detail.”

The findings highlight the connection between brain injuries and underlying psychological conditions, Dulla said.

“If you’re already struggling with some kind of psychiatric condition or at risk for some kind of psychiatric problem, brain injuries might be something that can kind of push you over the edge and have that change really come front and center when it might have been sort of a minor underlying thing before,” he said.

Experts say traumatic brain injury can lead to headaches, mood changes, memory loss and sleep issues. Stone said his research has shown repeated exposure to even low-level blasts can result in changes to the brain. The Department of Defense has been “very engaged” in studying the issue, Stone said, and a panel on which he serves is expected to release new guidelines in May for both the U.S. military and NATO allies.

“They’ve been very proactive about this,” he said.

An Army spokesperson on Thursday called the lab findings regarding the Maine shooter’s brain “concerning” and said they “underscore the Army’s need to do all it can to protect Soldiers against blast-induced injury.”

In addition to updating the guidance on risk mitigation, the Army plans to launch a public safety campaign and will begin requiring documentation of training environments and tracking of exposed personnel.

Sean Hodgson, the Lewiston gunman’s close friend and a fellow reservist, said Thursday that safety was a top priority at their training range and the blast exercises were well controlled.

“You feel it through you, but it’s mild,” he said.

“I never heard him complain about the blasts,” Hodgson said. “In my opinion it’s one of the safest ranges to be on. I never heard him complain about the blasts.”

Six weeks before the shooting, Hodgson texted an Army supervisor about his growing concerns about his friend, saying, “I believe he’s going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

That Sept. 15 message came months after relatives warned police that the shooter had grown paranoid and said they were concerned about his access to guns.

He was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit for two weeks in July after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons while on duty and declared him nondeployable.
In their first public comments since the shooting, the gunman’s family members apologized Wednesday for the attack, saying they are heartbroken for the victims, survivors and their loved ones.

“We are hurting for you and with you, and it is hard to put into words how badly we wish we could undo what happened,” they said in a statement. “While we cannot go back, we are releasing the findings of Robert’s brain study with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy to ensure it never happens again.”

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Matthew Noyes told a special commission that is holding hearings into the Oct. 25 massacre that the search for the shooter was hampered by confusion about who was in charge and poor communications.

“I recognize this is a complex response and investigation. Unfortunately with this responsibility comes Monday Morning quarterbacking,” said Noyes, who participated in the search as a member of Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Office.

Robert Card, a 40-year-old Army reservist, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a two-day search. He had showed signs of mental health decline before the massacre; evidence now shows he suffered from traumatic brain injuries, according to a brain tissue analysis by researchers from Boston University.

Noyes, one of his former Army colleagues to testify Thursday, encouraged the commission to interview more first responders who were “boots on the ground” during the shooting response, because he and others felt “communication was poor and caused several issues” and there was “little to no direction in the field” in the aftermath of the shooting. He also described the search for his former Army colleague as “very complex and perhaps surreal” at the time.

The analysis of the Lewiston shooter’s brain was released Wednesday by his family. There was degeneration in the nerve fibers that allow for communication between different areas of the brain, inflammation and small blood vessel injury, according to Dr. Ann McKee of Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center.

He had been an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where it is believed he was exposed to repeated low-level blasts. It is unknown if that caused his brain injury and what role brain injury played in his decline in mental health in the months before he opened fire at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston on Oct. 25. McKee made no connection between the brain injury and the gunman’s violent actions.

“While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms,” McKee said in the statement.

The brain tissue sample was sent to the lab last fall by Maine’s chief medical examiner. At that time, a Pentagon spokesperson said the Army was working to better understand the relationship between “blast overpressure” and brain health effects and had instituted several measures to reduce soldiers’ exposure, including limiting the number of personnel near blasts. An Army spokesperson didn’t respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.

In their first public comments since the shooting, the gunman’s family members also apologized for the attack, saying they are heartbroken for the victims, survivors and their loved ones.

“We are hurting for you and with you, and it is hard to put into words how badly we wish we could undo what happened,” they said in the statement. “While we cannot go back, we are releasing the findings of Robert’s brain study with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy to ensure it never happens again.”

Police and the Army were both warned that the shooter was suffering from deteriorating mental health in the months that preceded the shootings.

Some of his relatives warned police that he was displaying paranoid behavior and they were concerned about his access to guns. Body camera video of police interviews with reservists before his two-week hospitalization in upstate New York last summer also showed fellow reservists expressing worry and alarm about his behavior and weight loss.

The shooter was hospitalized in July after he shoved a fellow reservist and locked himself in a motel room during training. Later, in September, a fellow reservist told an Army superior he was concerned the gunman was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.” The reservist, Sean Hodgson, was not among those who testified Thursday.

Noyes and other Army reservists who knew the shooter were testifying before a special established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills to investigate the shooting. The hearing in Augusta is the seventh and final one currently slated for the commission. Commission chair Daniel Wathen said at a hearing with victims earlier this week that an interim report could be released by April 1.

In previous hearings, law enforcement officials have defended the approach they took with the gunman in the months before the shootings. Members of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office testified that the state’s yellow flag law makes it difficult to remove guns from a potentially dangerous person.

Democrats in Maine are looking to make changes to the state’s gun laws in the wake of the shootings. Mills wants to change state law to allow law enforcement to go directly to a judge to seek a protective custody warrant to take a dangerous person into custody to remove weapons. Other Democrats in Maine have proposed a 72-hour waiting period for most gun purchases.

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Robert Card, 40, opened fire at a bowling alley and a bar on Oct. 25, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner had requested a study of the brain tissue to try to answer the question of whether his military service could have contributed to his behavior. The gunman was exposed to repeated blasts while training U.S. Military Academy cadets on how to use guns, anti-tank weapon and grenades at West Point, New York.

“Robert Card had evidence of traumatic brain injury. In the white matter, the nerve fibers that allow for communication between different areas of the brain, there was significant degeneration, axonal and myelin loss, inflammation, and small blood vessel injury. There was no evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE),” said Dr. Ann McKee, director of the BU CTE Center, wrote. “These findings align with our previous studies on the effects of blast injury in humans and experimental models. While I cannot say with certainty that these pathological findings underlie Mr. Card’s behavioral changes in the last 10 months of life, based on our previous work, brain injury likely played a role in his symptoms.”

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting. The cause of death was ruled a suicide.

Family members had concerns about his behavior before the shooting. They reported that he was paranoid and delusional, winding up in a hospital for two weeks during training with other reservists at West Point.

The family released the following statement Wednesday:

“We want to begin by saying how deeply sorry and heartbroken we are for all the victims, survivors, and their loved ones, and to everyone in Maine and beyond who was affected and traumatized by this tragedy. We are hurting for you and with you, and it is hard to put into words how badly we wish we could undo what happened. While we cannot go back, we are releasing the findings of Robert’s brain study with the goal of supporting ongoing efforts to learn from this tragedy to ensure it never happens again. We thank the Maine Chief Medical Examiner’s office for requesting the brain analysis. We know it does not fully explain Robert’s actions, nor is it an excuse for the horrific suffering he caused, but we thank Dr. McKee for helping us understand his brain damage and how it may have impacted his mental health and behavior. By releasing these findings, we hope to raise awareness of traumatic brain injury among military service members, and we encourage more research and support for military service members with traumatic brain injuries. Our hearts remain with the victims, survivors, and their families.”

Other soldiers had also reported their concerns and his access to weapons was restricted when he left the hospital.

Law enforcement officials did receive warnings about those concerns, but after he failed to answer a door during a well-being check, the issue went unresolved.

The governor has created an independent commission to review the shootings, including the police response.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Tammy Asselin also had a message for lawmakers dealing with legislation in the aftermath of the Oct. 25 shootings, telling them to “put down your partisan lines and try to approach this like a parent would with simple common sense.”

“Enough is enough. It truly angers me to know that we were so close to preventing this but we failed,” she said Monday, echoing the concerns of other survivors and family members who testified before a commission investigating the tragedy.

Police were aware that the gunman, Army reservist Robert Card, was suffering from deteriorating mental health ahead of the shootings that left 18 people dead in a bowling alley and a bar and restaurant in Lewiston. Card shot and killed himself afterward.

An independent commission, established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, is reviewing the facts surrounding shootings, including the police response.

Like those who spoke at a previous hearing last month, the victims and family members on Monday questioned why authorities didn’t take away the Lewiston shooter’s guns given the warning signs he displayed before the deadly rampage. One, Ben Dyer, described being shot five times.

Asselin’s 11-year-old daughter Toni joined her briefly in front of the commission members. “I thought it was important for me to provide the face of a child who was there that evening,” she told the commissioners.

Mike Roderick, who was playing cornhole with his 18-year-old son when gunfire erupted, described the horror of being separated from his son, and his decision to turn off the lights at Schemengees Bar & Grille Restaurant when he found himself hiding in a utility closet. Both of them survived and officials credited the cutting of the lights for saving lives.

“My only hope is that we can prevent others from having to suffer the nightmares and trauma that will plague us for the rest of our lives. Hopefully this commission can figure who and where we dropped the ball and make sure that we learn from these horrible tragic mistakes, and share that information to teach others how to prevent this nightmare from ever happening again,” Roderick said.

The meeting was held at Lewiston City Hall, less than three miles from the two locations where the shootings took place.

Victims described a fun evening of cornhole or bowling before hearing loud pops. They described freezing, or fleeing. Some of them described crawling on the floor to escape. One described being shot in the arm, saying it felt like an “explosion.”

Tom Hatfield said someone who was bowling in his lane, Tricia Asselin, who was a cousin of Tammy Asselin, was shot to death. He said his girlfriend tried to hide under a table but he grabbed her, and they ran out a back door and escaped injury.

He said he thought he was OK but realized he wasn’t.

“I’m not good. I’m good at putting on a mask, and making people think I’m fine,” he said, adding that a resiliency center for victims was helpful.

Some of the victims belonged to Maine’s deaf community, including Steven Kretlow, who described being shot and diving under a table to pretend he was dead.

Kretlow and other members of the deaf community have said it was difficult for them to receive services after the shootings. He stressed that he needed an interpreter when he was in the hospital, and not having one just magnified the trauma of the experience.

The commission is expected to produce a comprehensive report about the shootings. The purpose of Monday’s meeting was “to hear from victims and others impacted by the shootings,” said Kevin Kelley, a spokesperson for the commission.

Members of the commission said the testimony from survivors was critical.

“We can all say we’ve made a step toward making sure this can never happen again,” said Daniel Wathen, the commission chairman.

Relatives of the shooter had warned police that he was displaying paranoid behavior and they were concerned about his access to guns. He was hospitalized for two weeks in July after he shoved a fellow reservist and locked himself in a motel room during training. Then, in September, a fellow reservist told an Army superior he was concerned the gunman was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.”

The commission is scheduled to hold another hearing on Thursday in Augusta to hear from members of the U.S. Army Reserves. The hearing with Army officials will be the seventh held by the commission and is the final hearing currently scheduled.

In previous hearings, law enforcement officials have defended the approach they took with the shooter in the months before the shootings. Members of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office testified that the state’s yellow flag law makes it difficult to remove guns from a potentially dangerous person.

Democrats in Maine are looking to make changes to the state’s gun laws in the wake of the shootings. Mills wants to change state law to allow law enforcement to seek a protective custody warrant to take a dangerous person into custody to remove weapons.

Other Democrats in Maine have proposed a 72-hour waiting period for most gun purchases. The proposals will likely give rise to a robust debate in Maine, where gun ownership is higher than most of the Northeast.

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Senate President Troy Jackson said lawmakers are not interested in taking away guns but they do want to seek consensus on ways to prevent gun violence following the shooting that claimed 18 lives.

“There has to be a way for level-headed people to come together and figure out a way that could possibly stop, or make it harder, for anything like this to happen again,” he said.

The suite of bills would expand spending on mental health, create mobile crisis centers and give 911 callers the option of connecting with mental health crisis workers as well as law enforcement. They would also ban bump stocks or other physical modifications that can transform a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.

Some of the proposals received a frosty reception from Republicans — especially the mandatory waiting period for gun purchases. Republicans tried unsuccessfully Wednesday to block it, noting that a similar bill was rejected last year.

Sen. Matt Harrington, R-York, accused Democrats of trying to ram through proposals that previously failed.

“These bills are here year after year after year. They get defeated. Now here we are dealing with them again because they don’t want to let the crisis in Lewiston go to waste,” he said.

Gun control has proven tricky in the past in a state that has a strong hunting tradition. But there seemed to be broad support for expanding mental health treatment with a goal of preventing gun violence and suicides. That’s something Harrington and many other Republicans agree with.

A bill sponsored by House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross would spend $17.5 million to create six crisis receiving centers, form an office of violence prevention in the Department of Health and Human Services, expand mobile crisis response teams and provide suicide prevention materials to be distributed by gun dealers.

Her bill would also create a statewide notification procedure for mass shootings, addressing concerns from the deaf community that some people had trouble getting information as the tragedy unfolded in Lewiston.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills already proposed background checks for advertised private sales, construction of a network of mental health crisis centers and bigger penalties for reckless private sales to prohibited people. She also wants to allow police officers to go directly to a judge to start the process of removing guns from someone in a psychiatric crisis.

The proposals follow the tragedy that unfolded when an Army reservist opened fire in October at a bowling alley and at bar in Lewiston. Thirteen people were injured, in addition to the 18 deaths. The gunman, 40-year-old Robert Card, died by suicide.

Addressing lawmakers last month, Mills urged lawmakers not to give in to the cynical view that it’s pointless to try to change gun laws because the laws will simply be broken. “For the sake of the communities, individuals and families now suffering immeasurable pain, for the sake of our state, doing nothing is not an option,” the governor said, bringing lawmakers to their feet.

An independent investigative commission appointed by the governor and attorney general may release preliminary findings as early as next month to help inform lawmakers’ decisions. The Legislature is due to wrap up its work in April.

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The annual evaluation from April 2023 indicated Robert Card, 40, of Bowdoin, was “a consummate professional” who “excelled as a squad leader” and whose mentoring of troops was “among the best,” according to the documents released under an open records request. Six months later, Card killed 18 people in a mass shooting before killing himself.

The personnel files also show he had received some mental health-related training years earlier when he volunteered to become one of his unit’s suicide prevention officers and attended associated schooling in 2015-2016.

The Maine mass shooter’s last evaluation was dated shortly before his ex-wife and son reported to police in May that he had become angry and paranoid in the preceding months, and had falsely accused his son of saying things behind his back.

No disciplinary records were in the files released under the federal Freedom of Information Act, but those wouldn’t necessarily be turned over without permission from his family, according to the Portland Press Herald, which first obtained the records.

Several of the gunman’s fellow Army reservists are due to testify next month to a governor-appointed independent commission investigating the Oct. 25 shootings, which were carried out at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston.

Body camera video of police interviews with reservists before he was hospitalized in upstate New York for two weeks last summer showed fellow reservists expressing worry and alarm about his behavior. One of them, a close friend of his, later issued a stark warning to his superior officer — six weeks before the attacks — that he was “going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

None of those concerns appeared in his personnel record, which dates back to 2002 when he enlisted at the University of Maine.

In his final review, in April, evaluators said the gunman, a sergeant first class, “exceeded standards” in almost all areas of his role as a senior trainer, including instruction on the use of grenades. In short, he was “a consummate professional” with an “approachable, reliable demeanor” who showed an “ability to train future leaders with great care for their safety and well-being,” according to the evaluation.

The documents didn’t mention concerns about his mental health. Three months later, he was hospitalized after pushing a fellow reservist and locking himself in his motel room while his unit was training near West Point, New York.

Fellow reservists told police who escorted him for an evaluation that he’d been acting paranoid and accusing others of talking about him behind his back. He said they were right to be worried: “They’re scared ’cause I’m gonna friggin’ do something. Because I am capable,” he told police.

The gunman shot himself in the back of a tractor-trailer at a former employer’s parking lot as authorities led the biggest manhunt in state history. His body was found two days after he ended the lives of 18 other people. Thirteen others were injured.

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Director Steve Dettelbach’s comments to The Associated Press came after he met this past week with family members of some of the 18 people killed in October at a bowling alley and a bar in Lewiston, Maine by a U.S. Army reservist who later took his own life.

He said people must not accept that gun violence is a prevalent part of American life.

“It seems to me that things that we used to sort of consider memorable, life-altering, shocking events that you might think about and talk about for months or years to come now are happening with seeming frequency that makes it so that we sort of think, “That’s just the one that happened this week,'” he said. “If we come to sort of accept that, that’s a huge hurdle in addressing the problem.”

Dettelbach, whose agency is responsible for enforcing the nation’s gun laws, met for nearly two hours at Central Maine Community College with relatives of those killed and survivors of the Lewiston shooting. An AP reporter also attended, along other with law enforcement officials.

Some expressed frustration about missed red flags and questioned why the gunman was able to get the weapon he used. Dettelbach told his audience that they can be a powerful catalyst for change.

“I’m sorry that we have to be in a place where we have to have these horrible tragedies happen for people to pay attention, but they have to pay attention,” Dettelbach said. “I can go around and talk, but your voices are very important and powerful voices. So if you choose to use them, you should understand that it makes a difference. It really makes a difference.”

Those who met with Dettelbach included members of Maine’s close-knit community of deaf and hard of hearing people, which lost four people in the Oct. 25 shooting at a bowling alley and at a bar.

Megan Vozzella, whose husband, Stephen, was killed, told Dettelbach through an ASL interpreter that the shooting underscores the need for law enforcement to improve communications with members of the deaf community. She said they felt out of the loop after the shooting.

“Nothing we do at this point will bring back my husband and the other victims,” Vozzella said in an interview after the meeting. “It hurts my heart to talk about this and so learning more every day about this, my only hope is that this can improve for the future.”

There are questions about why neither local law enforcement nor the military intervened to take away weapons from the shooter, Robert Card, despite his deteriorating mental health. In police body cam video released to the media this month, Card told New York troopers before his hospitalization last summer that fellow soldiers were worried about him because he was “gonna friggin’ do something.”

Dettelbach, in the AP interview, declined to comment on the specifics of Card’s case, which an independent commission in Maine is investigating. But he said it is clear that the nation needs to make it harder for people “that everyone agrees should not have firearms, who the law says are not entitled to have firearms, to get them because it’s too easy to get them now.”

Dettelbach’s conversation with victims was part of a tour in New England that also included meetings with law enforcement and others to discuss ways to tackle gun violence. Dettelbach, who has expressed support for universal background checks and banning so-called assault weapons, said he regularly meets with those affected by gun violence.

“Each one of these shootings is a tragedy that takes lives and changes other lives forever. And that’s whether it makes the news or not, whether it’s the suicide of a child or a drive by in the city, whether it’s a massacre at a parade, a spray bullets on a subway, whether it’s a man who kills his family, murders police” or a student with a rifle “shooting up their school,” he said during a speech at Dartmouth College on Wednesday.

“I submit to you that it is our patriotic duty as Americans to respond, to think of these people, to have their backs, to view this tough news as a call to action.”

Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, called for the changes in January in a speech that came three months after an Army reservist killed 18 people in the worst mass shooting in the history of the state. The reservist had a h istory of mental illness and erratic behavior before the shootings.

Mills said there is broad support for the kind of changes in her proposals, which would also establish a violence-prevention program at the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The proposals would need to find support in a state with a higher percentage of gun ownership than most of the Northeast.

“They are practical, common-sense measures that are Maine-made and true to our culture and our longstanding traditions while meeting today’s needs. They represent meaningful progress, without trampling on anybody’s rights, and they will better protect public safety,” Mills said.

One of Mills’ proposals would strengthen the state’s extreme risk protection order law. Some law enforcement personnel have said the state’s yellow flag law made it difficult to remove shooter Robert Card’s weapons despite clear warning signs. Mills said her change would allow law enforcement to seek a protective custody warrant to take a dangerous person into custody to remove weapons.

Another proposal would extend the National Instant Criminal Background Check System to advertised, private sales of firearms. Still another would incentivize the checks for unadvertised, private sales.

The proposals would also establish a statewide network of crisis receiving centers so that a person suffering a mental health crisis could get care swiftly, Mills said.

The governor’s supplemental budget includes other proposals geared at crisis response and mental health. It also proposes to create a Maine mass violence care fund with $5 million to cover physical and mental health expenses connected to a mass violence event and not covered by insurance.

“Our community’s difficult healing process will continue long into the future, and this will provide folks with the support they need when they need it,” said Democratic Rep. Kristen Cloutier of Lewiston.

The Maine gunman committed the shootings at a bowling alley and restaurant in Lewiston on Oct. 25. He was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.

He had been well known to law enforcement for months before the shootings, and a fellow reservist told an Army superior that he was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.”

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Reservist Robert Card told troopers who escorted him to a hospital in upstate New York that fellow reservists and others kept talking about him behind his back, “and it’s getting old,” according to police bodycam video obtained by multiple media outlets under New York’s Freedom of Information Law.

“They’re scared ’cause I’m gonna friggin’ do something. Because I am capable,” he said to the New York State Police officers.

The release of the police body cam video recorded July 16 followed the release of a new detail Thursday by Maine State Police who addressed an independent commission investigating the tragedy: A review of the gunman’s cellphone revealed a note he had written three days before the Oct. 25 shooting in Lewiston in which he said he’d “had enough” and warned he was “trained to hurt people.”

The 40-year-old shooter killed 18 people and wounded 13 at a bowling alley and a bar, leading to the largest manhunt in state history and tens of thousands of people sheltering in their homes. His body was found two days later. He had died by suicide.

The police body cam video provided a chilling glimpse of the gunman after he had been involved in an altercation and locked himself in his motel room, alarming fellow reservists from Maine. He appeared thinner than normal, his fellow reservists said.

An earlier report by state police indicated he had threatened fellow reservists. But New York State Police said in a statement that he was never in custody. He was driven to Keller Army Hospital for evaluation by fellow reservists, and troopers followed the private vehicle. He ended up spending two weeks at a psychiatric hospital.

In an email from its public information office, the New York State Police noted the Lewiston gunman was not in police custody and declined further comment Friday, referring questions to the Army. The Army did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Police and the Army were warned that the reservist was suffering from deteriorating mental health long before the shooting.

Family members warned police in May that that the 40-year-old was growing paranoid and expressed concern about his access to guns before the incident unfolded while his unit was training in July in upstate New York. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons on duty and declared him nondeployable.

Then in September, a fellow reservist who considered the shooter to be his best friend provided a stark warning, telling an Army superior that he was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.”

Dressed in gym shorts and an Army T-shirt, the Maine gunman told New York state police people were talking behind his back for about six months. He said people were starting rumors that he was gay and a pedophile. He said he’d heard snippets of people talking behind his back, and that he’d heard that the rumors were posted online, though he could not find anything online.

He also told troopers he was not on any prescription medication.

In Maine, a warning that he might “shoot up” the Saco armory where his reserve unit was based prompted a Sagadahoc County deputy to try to meet with him at his home in Bowdoin. He did not come to the door, even though he was believed to be inside, and the deputy said he did not have legal authority to knock down the door to force an encounter to assess whether he should be taken into protective custody. That step is necessary to trigger Maine’s “yellow flag” law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove someone’s guns during a psychiatric health crisis.

The deputy said an Army official suggested letting the situation “simmer” rather than forcing a confrontation. The deputy also received assurances from the reservist’s family that they were removing his access to guns.

Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry said Friday that he was never contacted by the Army or New York State Police at that time, and that he was unaware of the body cam video until it surfaced in news reports.

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It took police two days to find the body of shooter Robert Card, who died by suicide, while tens of thousands of Maine residents were ordered to shelter in their homes.

Police have been criticized for not finding him sooner, after they quickly identified him and found his car, and twice searched a nearby recycling facility before finding his body there on a third search.

Maj. Lucas Hare told a panel investigating the Lewiston shooting that he decided to delay a search of the woods around the car because they’d been told that the gunman, a former Army reservist, might have a thermal gun scope and night-vision capabilities.

“We would essentially be asking a patrol officer, with their canine, to go into the woods without the ability to see at night,” to face off against a man with military training, he said.

“I would say that from my position as a leader, I would be negligent to ask somebody to do that,” said Hare, who heads the state police operations division.

He said the car was left in a place where it could be easily seen, and he told officers to wait for a SWAT team.

“I know that was not a popular decision,” Hare said, adding that the situation immediately made him think “there was a possibility of an ambush.”

He noted that police did deploy a helicopter with heat-seeking capability to search for Card.

Hare also described some of the confusion and tension during the search as multiple police agencies descended on the area, including some officers who showed up on their own, and emergency calls flooded in.

The Oct. 25 shooting at a bowling alley and a bar was the deadliest in state history. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey assembled the independent commission to determine whether anything could have been done under existing law to prevent the tragedy, and whether changes are needed to prevent future mass shootings.

State Police Chief Col. Bill Ross told the panel that the shooting was “extremely unique and extremely challenging” because it involved two separate locations followed by an intense search. He said that in most other mass shootings, the suspect has died or been captured at the scene.

“The weight on our shoulders to find Robert Card was immense and became heavier as each minute passed,” Ross said.

Both police and the Army were warned that the gunman was suffering from deteriorating mental heath in the months before the shooting.

In May, relatives warned police that he was sinking into paranoia, and they expressed concern about his access to guns. In July, he was hospitalized for two weeks after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room during training in upstate New York. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons on duty and declared him nondeployable.

Then in September, a fellow reservist provided a stark warning, telling an Army superior that the shooter was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.”

Army officials later downplayed the warning, but it prompted local police to go to his home in Bowdoin to check on him. He didn’t come to the door and the deputy said he didn’t have legal authority under Maine’s yellow card law to knock in the door.

The deputy told the commission that an Army official suggested letting the situation “simmer” rather than forcing a confrontation. The deputy also received assurances from the shooter’s family that they were removing his access to guns.

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The governor signed bipartisan legislation after commissioners said they needed the ability to ensure access to testimony and materials to reach a conclusion on whether anything could have been done under existing law to stop the shooting on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, and to suggest steps to be taken to prevent similar tragedies in the future.

The shooter who killed 18 people on Oct. 25 at a Lewiston bowling alley and a bar was an Army reservist, and members of his Maine-based unit were aware of his declining mental health and hospitalization during drills last summer in West Point, New York. But the leader of his unit downplayed a reservist’s warning that Robert Card was going to “snap and do a mass shooting.”

The Army agreed Monday to participate in a public session on March 7, a commission spokesperson said, after the panel’s director told lawmakers that the panel was running into issues getting information from the Army.

The commission said it’s pleased that the Army will make individuals available to testify, a spokesperson said. The Army didn’t immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment on who might be testifying.

“Commission members have always said that they hope and expect people will cooperate with this independent investigation and having the power to subpoena should only be necessary in circumstances where the investigation could be delayed or impeded without it,” spokesperson Kevin Kelley said in a statement Tuesday.

Evidence of the shooter’s mental health struggles had surfaced months before the shooting. In May, relatives warned police that he had grown paranoid, and they expressed concern about his access to guns. In July, he was hospitalized after shoving a fellow reservist and locking himself in a motel room. In August, the Army barred him from handling weapons on duty and declared him nondeployable.

Then in September, a fellow reservist warned of a mass shooting. Police went to the gunman’s home in Bowdoin but he did not come to the door. A sheriff’s deputy told the commission that the Army suggested letting the situation “simmer” rather than forcing a confrontation and that he received assurances the shooter’s family was removing his access to guns.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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One by one, relatives of seven of the people who died described their heartbreak, in ways both large and small.

“I’ve been thrust into experiencing every ‘without Jason’ first in quick succession: signing Christmas gift tags just ‘Mom’ after 24 years of signing them ‘Mom and Dad,'” said Kathleen Walker, whose husband, Jason, died rushing at the shooter. “The system failed, and we can’t allow this to happen again.”

Speakers included survivors Walker and Stacy Cyr, who lost their partners; childhood friends Jason Walker and Michael Deslauriers, who charged at the gunman; Elizabeth Seal, who is caring for four children after the death of her husband, Joshua; and Megan Vozzella, whose husband, Steve, died two weeks shy of their one-year anniversary.

Also testifying were members of the tight-knit deaf community in Lewiston, which lost four people in the Oct. 25 shooting at a bowling alley and at a bar that was hosting a cornhole tournament. Eighteen people were killed and 13 injured.

Survivors said the flow of information to the deaf community was stymied by a lack of American Sign Language interpreters at the crime scene, in the hospitals and at the center where relatives had gathered. They also said translations of the earliest public news briefings were spotty.

“There were barriers to captioning,” said Seal, who is deaf, speaking via sign language that was then spoken by an interpreter. “Sometimes there was a lag in captioning. Sometimes there would be pop-ups that would hide the captioning. With Josh not being here, I feel that I need to take this on in his stead. We need to do something about this.”

Daniel Wathen, former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and chair of the independent commission, said he agreed with Seal.

“The word access has taken on new meaning both for me and the entire state of Maine,” Wathen said.

The commission was established by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and state Attorney General Aaron Frey to review events leading up to the shootings and then suggest policies to prevent similar tragedies from happening again.

The gunman, Robert Card, 40, was experiencing a mental health breakdown before the shooting, and police were aware of his deteriorating mental health.

His son and ex-wife told police in May that Card was becoming paranoid and hearing voices, and a fellow reservist explicitly warned in September that he was going to commit a mass killing. In between, Card was hospitalized for two weeks for erratic behavior while his Maine-based Army Reserve unit was training in West Point, New York.

More than a month before the shootings, police went to Card’s home for a face-to-face assessment required under the state’s yellow flag law, which allows a judge to order the removal of guns from someone who is experiencing a psychiatric emergency. But Card refused to answer the door, and police said they couldn’t legally force the issue.

Tens of thousands of residents in Lewiston and neighboring communities were under a lockdown order after the shootings. Card’s body was found two days later. The medical examiner ruled that he died by suicide.

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills made the shootings the focus of her annual State of the State address, using her speech to propose background checks for some private gun sales, expanded mental health treatment and a change to the yellow flag law.

Looking ahead, the commission has said it needs subpoena power to complete its work, and a bill to provide that authority is advancing in the Legislature. On Wednesday, a committee unanimously supported subpoenas to compel interviews or documents. Both legislative chambers would have to approve the proposal with two-thirds majorities for it to go into effect immediately.

Other members of the independent commission include former U.S. Attorney Paula Silsby and Debra Baeder, Maine’s former chief forensic psychologist.

Rachael Sloat, who was engaged to be married to shooting victim Peyton Brewer Ross, a shipbuilder at Bath Iron Works, described the heartbreak of her 2-year-old still asking for her daddy as she pleaded for changes in the system.

“Where are you?” she said through tears. “Every politician, every member of law enforcement, every registered voter in the country — I want you to hear those words. ‘Where are you?’ Because my fellow Americans, where are you? You failed my little girl. That’s all I have to say.”

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The Democratic governor delivered her State of the State address to a joint session of the Maine Legislature three months after Army reservist Robert Card killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, the state’s second-largest city. Mills read aloud the name of each victim and recognized law enforcement officers in the gallery.

She wants to allow police officers to be able to go directly to a judge to start the process of removing guns from someone in a psychiatric crisis, addressing a problem that arose when a deputy was stymied by Card’s refusal to answer the door for a required face-to-face meeting that’s necessary under current law. The rampage happened little more than a month later.

Mills also wants to require background checks for advertised private gun sales, increase penalties for reckless private sales to prohibited people, and create a statewide network of crisis centers for people experiencing mental health emergencies. According to the Boston Globe, she also said she will create a fund with $5 million in it to help cover the long-term medical needs of those injured in the shootings.

Citing wide-ranging support for action, Mills urged lawmakers not to wait any longer or give in to the cynical attitude that it’s pointless to try to change gun laws because they will be broken.

“For the sake of the communities, individuals and families now suffering immeasurable pain, for the sake of our state, doing nothing is not an option,” the governor said, prompting a standing ovation.

In addition to gun violence and mental health, the governor used her annual speech to address extreme weather events following storms that hit Maine in recent weeks, causing millions of dollars of damage. She proposed funding for community resiliency efforts and infrastructure upgrades.

She also proposed the creation of a new violence and injury prevention program requiring the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to serve as a clearinghouse for data from law enforcement, hospitals, schools and other sources to inform public policy decisions.

Her proposal for a network of crisis centers, meanwhile, would build upon the first such facility already in operation in Portland and a second one that’s being created in central Maine. A third center would be built in Lewiston as part of a statewide expansion overseen by the Maine Department of Health and Human Services.

The gun control proposals could face some pushback in a state known for its hunting traditions.
Senate GOP Leader Trey Stewart and House GOP Leader Billy Bob Faulkingham, delivering the formal Republican response, didn’t address the governor’s gun control proposals but emphasized reining in government and putting faith in people to make decisions.

Maine already has a yellow flag law that differs from other states’ so-called red flag laws, which allow family members to go directly to a judge. The yellow flag law requires police to initiate the process.

The proposed expansion would allow police to go directly to a judge for a warrant to take someone into protective custody, allowing a warrant to be issued for the temporary removal of guns from someone in a mental health crisis without first meeting to assess whether protective custody is necessary as required by current law.

Mills also proposed that sellers utilizing an advertised private gun sale — a sale posted on Craigslist, for example — must conduct a background check utilizing commercially licensed businesses like L.L. Bean or Cabela’s, while legal standards for prosecution and penalties would be strengthened to deter other people from transferring weapons to prohibited buyers.

“Violence is not a simple problem. And the remedy is not a simple, single measure,” the governor told lawmakers. “And these proposals represent progress, and they do not trample on anybody’s rights,”

The speech was delivered to the Maine Legislature in the second part of Mills’ annual address. Hours earlier, she released a letter to lawmakers to address her upcoming supplemental budget and other proposals.

In her letter, Mills urged fiscal restraint after several years of budget surpluses as the state bounced back from the COVID-19 pandemic, and she said she intends to set aside $100 million for the next two-year budget when state revenues are anticipated to level off.

“I recognize there are many needs across the state, and I know, in the past, we have been able to say yes to a lot of things. However, this year is, and must be, different,” Mills wrote. “If we do not budget responsibly now, the Legislature will be forced to make painful cuts in the future — just like other states are having to do now.”
Nonetheless, she did propose some modest spending to address the state’s housing crunch, opioid epidemic, child welfare and education.

Mills cited individual income growth, low unemployment and business openings among reasons for being optimistic about the future. She said that despite recent changes including the shootings and storms, “our state is getting stronger every day.”

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An independent commission is investigating the October shootings that killed 18 people in a bowling alley and a restaurant in the worst mass shooting in Maine history. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills said the panel needs subpoena power, in part to access the shooter’s military records.

The Maine Legislature’s Committee on Judiciary held an emergency public hearing on the request Monday. The independent commission is hoping to bring Army officials to the table to testify about shooter and former reservist Robert Card’s history in March.

The judiciary committee could vote on the bill seeking subpoena power on Wednesday, a spokesperson for the committee said. Mills’ proposal for subpoena power has the backing of the Democratic and Republican leaders of both houses of the Legislature.

“The victims, their families, as well as the Maine people deserve to know the details of how the system failed us on Oct. 25,” said Republican Rep. Billy Bob Faulkingham, the House minority leader. “How are they going to get any answers if they don’t have subpoena power.”

The gunman committed the killings on Oct. 25 and then died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. The independent commission investigating the shootings is expected to look into potential missed opportunities to prevent the shootings.

The shooter spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital in New York last summer after an altercation with other reservists. Family members also raised concerns over his behavior and deteriorating mental health state prior to the killings.

Mills and Attorney General Aaron Frey have said the subpoena power is important to “ensure that the commission has the tools it needs to fully and effectively discharge its critical mission of determining the facts of the tragedy in Lewiston.” Mills’ bill states that it would also authorize the commission to request and receive records from state agencies needed to complete the mission.

Maine Policy Institute, a free-market think tank, testified against the proposal on Monday. The group said in written testimony that it felt the independent commission members “were handpicked by the chief executive and the attorney general to serve in this capacity and are beholden to nobody but the governor and attorney general.”

The independent commission took its first testimony on Jan. 25 and heard from members of the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office. The law enforcement officers said the state’s yellow flag law that allows guns to be confiscated from someone in a mental health crisis limited them in what they could do when they received warnings about the gunman.

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Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry addressed an independent commission that’s investigating a mass shooting in Lewiston, focusing on the difficulty in balancing public safety versus individual rights. The deputies were not in a position to take Robert Card into protective custody in September, he said, despite a fellow reservist warning that he was “going to snap and do a mass shooting.”

“There is always after a tragedy an opportunity to wonder if more could have been done. But that analysis must always take into consideration the limitations placed on law enforcement by the law at the time of the event,” Merry said.

The interaction between Card and deputies during the welfare check in which Card refused to come to the door is widely viewed as a missed opportunity to take Card into protective custody, the first step in triggering Maine’s yellow flag law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove weapons from someone in a mental health crisis.

Deputies were warned by Card’s son and ex-wife months earlier, in May, that Card was descending into paranoia and behaving erratically, Card was briefly hospitalized in July while training with his Army Reserves unit. In both interactions with family members, in May and September, deputies were warned that confronting Card would lead to an escalation, Merry said.

After the attempted welfare check in September, Merry said, deputies believed that the matter had been “resolved” through involvement of the family and Army Reserves, and that Card posed “no risk to himself or to others.”
Democratic Gov. Janet Mills and state Attorney General Aaron Frey assembled the commission to review the events that led up to the shootings at a bowling alley and a restaurant in Lewiston on Oct. 25.

Lawyers for some of the victims’ families have pointed to missed opportunities to prevent Card from committing the shootings and was found dead afterward from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Mills and Frey said Wednesday that they have introduced legislation to grant subpoena authority to the commission as it investigates, a power that commissioners have said they will need.

The legislation “will ensure that the commission has the tools it needs to fully and effectively discharge its critical mission of determining the facts of the tragedy in Lewiston,” they said in a statement.

Thursday’s commission meeting was the first of four in which there will be an open forum for comments. Meetings with victims, Maine State Police and the Army are also scheduled. Members have said they hope to produce a full report by early summer.

An independent report by the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office after the shooting found that local law enforcement knew Card’s mental health was declining and that he was hearing voices and experiencing psychotic episodes. The report cleared the agency’s response to concerns about Card, but several legal experts have said it revealed missed opportunities to intervene.

The commission meeting Thursday is chaired by Daniel Wathen, former chief justice of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court. Other members include Debra Baeder, the former chief forensic psychologist for the state, and Paula Silsby, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Maine.

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Officers arrived at the two shooting scenes in Lewiston last October not knowing if the gunman was still there, and with living and dead victims on the floors. One officer described desperate survivors screaming for help as he searched for the shooter.

“They grab at our legs and try to stop us and we can not help them,” wrote Lewiston Officer Keith Caouette. “We have to walk by and continue to search and hope they are alive when we come back around.”

Another police officer’s first instinct was that an act of domestic terrorism had been committed, underscored by the heavy police presence and flashing blue lights. “I truly felt like we were at war,” Auburn Lt. Steven Gosselin wrote.

Their descriptions of the scenes at a bowling alley and a bar and grill where 18 people were killed and 13 others wounded were included in more than 3,000 pages of documents released Friday in response to Freedom of Access Act requests by The Associated Press and other news organizations.

Associated Press reporters had reviewed more than a third of the pages before the website with the documents crashed late Friday afternoon. State officials said documents will be made available again on Monday.

Among the details included in the report were the words from a note left behind by the gunman, 40-year-old Army reservist Robert Card, who wrote that he just wanted to “be left the (expletive) alone,” the Portland Press Herald reported. The note also contained his phone password and passwords needed to access his various accounts.

The gunman’s family and fellow Army reservists reported that he was suffering from a mental breakdown in the months leading up to the shooting Oct. 25, 2023. In the aftermath, the legislature passed new gun laws for Maine that bolstered the state’s “yellow flag” law, criminalized the transfer of guns to prohibited people and expanded funding for mental health crisis care.

Card’s body was found two days after the shooting in the back of a tractor-trailer on his former employer’s property in nearby Lisbon. An autopsy concluded he died by suicide.

The documents that were released Friday provided officers’ firsthand accounts of what they saw along with additional details of the massive search for Card and the investigation.

At the peak, the law enforcement presence was immense with 16 SWAT team and officers from 14 different agencies, along with eight helicopters and additional airplanes, and an underwater recovery team, wrote state police Lt. Tyler Stevenson.

“I have experienced several large-scale manhunts in my career, but this was, by far, the largest manhunt I have been a part of,” he wrote.

Officers used lasers to map the shooting scenes, searched Tracfone purchases at a Walmart in the event Card had a burner phone and even retrieved data from the infotainment system of Card’s Subaru.

Police recovered hundreds of items of potential evidence from a number of locations, including bullet cartridges and fragments, phones, hair, fibers, swabs of a gas pedal, a handwritten letter, a tomahawk knife, arrows, a hearing aid, broken eyeglasses, a blue sneaker, a black chain necklace, bean bags, miscellaneous military records, $255 in cash, and a night vision monocular.

The documents underscored the confusion as police officers poured into the region. In addition to the two crime scenes, police responded to unfounded reports of a gunman in a field near the shooting scene, at another restaurant and at a massive Walmart distribution center.

“I asked who was in charge and got no answer,” wrote Androscoggin County Deputy Jason Chaloux, describing the scene outside the bar.

Chief Paul Ferland of the Monmouth Police Department said that when he arrived in Lisbon hours after the shootings, 60-70 officers were “standing around” waiting for instructions that never came. A member of the U.S. Marshals Service told him he had been given no updates and was going to start following up on his own leads.

Ferland said he got more information from reporters standing outside the hospital than he did from law enforcement and that he withdrew his officers by early morning due to concerns for their safety.

“It became obvious to me that there was a lack of communications between agencies and no one knew what was going on,” he wrote.

Others described the horrific scenes inside the bowling alley and bar and grill. Cellphones ringing on bloodied tabletops, tablecloths and a pool table cover turned into makeshift stretchers.

“A quick scan of the building revealed blood and flesh scattered throughout the business,” Lewiston Detective Zachary Provost wrote of the bowling alley. “I also could smell the heavy odor of gunpowder mixed with burning flesh.”

Caouette, the Lewiston officer who responded to the bar and grill, said some witnesses yelled that the gunman was still in the building when he arrived while others said he already left. He told one man lying on the floor to “hang in there,” but by the time he returned to him, the man had died.

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Honoring victims, survivors and first responders was the first order of business for lawmakers who’ll be taking up gun control proposals and potential changes to the state’s so-called yellow flag law, which allows a judge to remove guns from someone in a mental health crisis.

His hands shaking and his voice raw with emotion, Arthur Barnard told a rally of gun control activists that it was time to fix “careless” laws, stop playing the blame game and work together to prevent future tragedies.

“This is not about taking guns, OK? This is about doing the right thing. And finding the right politicians who are willing to do the right thing more than they’re afraid of losing their job,” said Barnard, whose son Arthur Strout was gunned down while playing billiards with friends.

Eighteen were killed and 13 injured when an Army reservist with deteriorating mental health opened fire Oct. 25 at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston.

The shootings happened little more than a month after a deputy tried to check on the reservist, the first step to putting someone in protective custody under the state’s yellow flag law. But the man didn’t open the door, and the deputy didn’t have authority to force his way in, a sheriff said.

Legislative leaders including Senate President Troy Jackson and House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross have talked about revisiting the yellow flag law and updating Maine’s existing gun laws like background checks, but have not publicly revealed details. Aides have said they want to get stakeholders together to try to build support before offering specific language.

On Wednesday, lawmakers devoted time to acknowledging the loss in both the Senate and House chambers.
In the Senate, a chorus from Lewiston High School sang the national anthem and Democratic Sen. Peggy Rotundo of Lewiston warned her colleagues against forgetting what happened in her hometown.

“The world may have moved on but for the people of Lewiston, the surrounding communities and many others in Maine, the healing is just beginning. The pain, the trauma and the anguish remain,” she said.

In the House, Democratic Rep. Kristen Cloutier of Lewiston told her colleagues that she remains overcome with sadness. “Nothing has been the same since that night. And nothing will ever been the same again,” she said.

The remembrances and tributes set a collective tone for the session, but gun control remains a divisive issue. Second Amendment supporters made their presence known Wednesday, mingling in the Hall of Flags as Barnard and others spoke at a rally hosted by the Maine Gun Safety Coalition.

Holding a leatherbound copy of the U.S. Constitution, Robert Duhaime, a boatbuilder from Surry who also owns a gun range, was extremely skeptical that lawmakers can do anything to prevent gun violence.

“Show me what laws would have done anything to prevent this tragedy in Lewiston. Show me one,” he said. “We already have so many laws on the books.”

Also on the future agenda was a request by state Rep. John Andrews, who sits on the Veterans and Legal Affairs Committee, to impeach Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who denied Republican former President Donald Trump a spot on the state’s primary ballot over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The proposal faced long odds in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, the first hurdle being securing enough votes to proceed, followed by an impeachment vote in the House and a trial in the Maine Senate.

Several GOP lawmakers tried to raise the issue from the floor but were rebuffed by the Democratic house speaker.
Lawmakers also planned to consider bills carried over from the last session, including a proposal to give greater sovereignty to Native American tribes in the state and another to amend the Maine Constitution to enshrine the right to an abortion, along with hundreds of other old and new bills.

Lawmakers also will have to decide how to deal with a supplemental budget that’s expected to top $100 million.
As for gun control, Max Zachau, a lifelong Maine hunter, urged fellow hunters to join him in standing up for “better laws.”

Shotguns used by waterfowl hunters are limited to a maximum of three rounds, even as some assault rifles carry high-capacity magazines, he noted.

“The fact that we give a flock of ducks a better chance to escape than what we give to a classroom full of school kids tells me that our regulatory system is woefully inadequate,” Zachau said.

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As it has become tradition, the person was released with CMMC employees applauding their exit during their sendoff.

The patient now prepares to continue his recovery at home, just before Christmas.

“This is an early Christmas present, not just for the patient and his family, but for all of us at Central Maine Healthcare,” said Steve Littleson, president and CEO.

“The doctors, nurses and team members at CMMC extend our deepest condolences to everyone affected by this tragic event and wish all a measure of peace this holiday season in every stage of grief and healing.” said the CMMC in a social media post.

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The video, which was released to the Portland Press Herald and then sent to The Associated Press, documents a Sept. 16 call between Sagadoc County Sheriff’s Sgt. Aaron Skolfield and Army Reserve Capt. Jeremy Reamer. Skolfield was following up with Reamer about the potential threat posed by Robert Card, 40, who carried out the Oct. 25 attacks at a bowling alley and a restaurant. He was found dead two days later of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Military officials alerted police in September that Card had been hospitalized in July after exhibiting erratic behavior while training, that he still had access to weapons and that he had threatened to “shoot up” an Army reserve center in Saco, a city in southern Maine. The sheriff’s department responded by briefly staking out the Saco facility and going to Card’s home in Bowdoin for what Reamer described as a “welfare check.”

“The only thing I would ask is if you could just document it,” Reamer said. “Just say, ’He was there, he was uncooperative. But we confirmed that he was alive and breathing.’ And then we can go from there. That’s, from my end here, all we’re really looking for.”

Skolfield mentioned Maine’s yellow flag law, which can be used to remove guns from potentially dangerous people, after Reamer said Card had refused medical treatment after his hospitalization.

“So that, obviously, is a hurdle we have to deal with. But at the same time, we don’t want to throw a stick of dynamite on a pool of gas, either — make things worse,” he said.

Reamer expressed similar concerns. “I’m a cop myself,” he said. “Obviously, I don’t want you guys to get hurt or do anything that would put you guys in a compromising position.”

Auburn City Councilor Leroy Walker, Sr., whose son Joseph Walker was killed in the shootings expressed frustration with police after seeing the video. Joseph Walker was the manager of Schemengees Bar & Grill, where part of the attack took place.

“I would like to know what we train these people to do. Is it just to deliver mail? Or stop innocent people that may be driving 11 miles (per hour) over the speed limit?” Walker said in a text message, noting that watching the video made him “sick.”

In the video, Skolfield referred to the Cards as “a big family in this area,” and said he didn’t want to publicize that police were visiting the home. He told Reamer he would reach out to Card’s brother, Ryan, to ensure family members had taken Card’s guns, and a second video shows an officer at the father’s home. After Card’s father said he hadn’t spoken with Ryan in several days, the officer said he would try again later.

“I just wanted to make sure Robert doesn’t do anything foolish at all,” he said.

A report released last week by Sheriff Joel Merry made clear that local law enforcement knew months before the attack that Card’s mental health was deteriorating. Police were aware of reports that he was paranoid, hearing voices, experiencing psychotic episodes and possibly dealing with schizophrenia.

Merry and Lewiston city officials declined to comment on the release of the videos. But a former New York Police Department detective sergeant who reviewed them for The Associated Press said the events preceding the shooting illustrate the difficulty in applying Maine’s yellow flag law. Lax laws about removing weapons from dangerous people is a problem in numerous states, said Felipe Rodriquez, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

“The laws are just too convoluted and they are working against each other. That’s the biggest problem we have,” Rodriquez said.

Dan Flannery, the director of the Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University, cautioned that only so much about a police investigation can be gleaned from a few minutes of video.

“There is always context, there is the issue of what is the training and protocol within the division,” Flannery said. “Violent behavior is unfortunately one of the most difficult things to predict.”

But attorneys for shooting victims’ families said the footage supports a pattern of police ignoring clear warning signs about Card in the weeks prior to the shooting. One of the attorneys, Ben Gideon of Auburn, said “watching that footage, knowing what happened approximately six weeks later, is chilling and surreal.”

The attorneys said they are looking forward to an independent Army inspector general’s full accounting of the events leading up to the shootings. Some of the information they’ve gathered so far, including the video released Friday, is “highly concerning,” said Travis Brennan, another attorney for the families.

“It’s one example of many of system failures. There is no question here that this is an individual who had overt warning signs,” Brennan said.

In addition to the inspector general’s investigation, Gov. Janet Mills appointed an independent commission led by a former state chief justice to review all aspects of the tragedy.

The actions of authorities ahead of and during mass shootings has come under increasing scrutiny. Last year, the Air Force was ordered to pay more than $230 million in damages to survivors and victims’ families for failing to flag a conviction that might have kept the gunman in a 2017 church shooting in Texas from legally buying the weapon he used in the attack.

After a gunman fatally shot 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas, last year, state lawmakers issued a scathing report faulting law enforcement at every level with failing “to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety.” Several officers lost their jobs over the halting and haphazard response, and a state prosecutor is still considering whether to bring criminal charges.

___

Ramer reported from Concord, New Hampshire. Associated Press writers Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington, Nick Perry in Meredith, New Hampshire, and Jake Bleiberg in Dallas contributed to this report.

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Despite receiving warnings about the man’s deteriorating mental health, drunken threats and possession of guns, the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office avoided confronting Robert Card, the 40-year-old Army reservist who later killed 18 people at a bowling alley and a bar on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, the experts said of the report released late Thursday by Sheriff Joel Merry.

Card’s body was found — with a self-inflicted gunshot wound — two days after the shootings. Reports soon began to emerge that he had spent two weeks in a psychiatric hospital months before the attacks and had amassed weapons.

The legal experts told The Associated Press that the report — prepared for the sheriff’s office by a lawyer who’s a retired federal drug agent— leaves unresolved questions about police’s potential ability to have removed guns from Card before the shootings happened.

The report delved into mental health concerns raised about Card. It states that the response to those concerns by the department’s officers “was reasonable under the totality of the circumstances” at the time. In a statement, Merry said the review “found that responding deputies followed the law and their training with the information available at the time.”

Democratic Gov. Janet Mills has appointed an independent commission led by a former state chief justice to review all aspects of the tragedy. And Maine’s congressional delegation said Friday there will be an independent Army inspector general’s investigation to review the Army’s actions, alongside an ongoing administrative Army investigation.

The Sagadahoc report makes clear that local law enforcement knew Card’s mental health was deteriorating, with reports that he was paranoid, hearing voices, experiencing psychotic episodes and possibly dealing with schizophrenia.

In May, Card’s ex-wife and his son reached out to a school resource officer about what they called Card’s erratic behavior. A deputy worked with the family to get help and heeded its suggestion not to confront Card directly for fear that it could cause an unnecessary escalation, the report states.

In September, police were alerted by officials with the Army Reserves about Card, who was hospitalized in July after exhibiting erratic behavior while training. The officials warned that Card still had access to weapons and that he had threatened to “shoot up” an Army Reserve center in Saco, the report said.

That caught the full attention of police, who responded by briefly staking out the Saco facility and going to Card’s home in Bowdoin, Maine, even as an Army Reserve leader suggested that all that was needed was a “welfare check.”

A visit to Card’s home by Sagadahoc Sgt. Aaron Skolfield on Sept. 16 represented the best opportunity for police to assess Card face-to-face — something that could have been necessary to take him into protective custody, a step needed to trigger Maine’s “yellow flag” law, which allows a judge to temporarily remove someone’s guns during a psychiatric health crisis.

Skolfield called for backup, knowing Card was considered armed and dangerous, and knocked on Card’s door. The deputy saw curtains move and heard noises suggesting Card was inside. But Card did not answer the door, and Skolfield correctly concluded he lacked the legal authority to force the issue during a wellness check, the report said.

Worried for his own safety, Skolfield went back to his cruiser, visited the nearby home of Card’s father and then returned to stake out Card’s home before leaving to respond to a domestic assault, the report said.

All that day, Skolfield was in contact with other law officers, Army officials and family members about Card’s mental health and to ensure that family members were trying to prevent Card’s access to guns.

The report concluded that Skolfield “did not have sufficient grounds to take Mr. Card into protective custody, which also foreclosed his discretion to initiate the process for confiscation of Mr. Card’s firearms.”

No family member or reservist contacted the sheriff’s office after Sept. 17, and a sheriff’s advisory bulletin asking agencies to locate Card was lifted on Oct. 18.

The report’s conclusion that the officers’ actions were reasonable is subject to interpretation, said Adanté Pointer, a civil rights attorney based in Oakland, California, who reviewed the report. What it makes clear is that local law enforcement had numerous opportunities to intercede in “this growing, escalating and ultimately deadly situation” and did not, Pointer said.

The report paints a picture of officers who were “scared” to deal with Card, Pointer said.

There was already enough evidence back in May to begin the process of seizing Card’s weapons under the yellow flag law, said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and current president of the West Coast Trial Lawyers in Los Angeles who reviewed the report.

“A different approach to policing, or a different set of laws, might have saved a lot of lives,” Rahmani said.

Prepared by Michael Cunniff, a Portland attorney who is a former supervisory special agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the report also addressed protective custody of those in crisis, the yellow flag law and the temporary seizure of guns.

Cunniff declined comment Friday. Sheriff Merry didn’t immediately respond to questions, including how the report was commissioned and who funded it.

Merry did say his office is cooperating with all investigations.

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