Maine shooting witnesses recall event
LEWISTON, Maine — The first loud noise 10-year-old Toni Asselin heard sounded like the thwack of a ball being hit hard across a pool table. She thought the second might have been someone dropping a bowling ball.
“The third one, when I walked over to see if someone was hurt, I saw a person get shot and fall off their stool,” Asselin said.
It was just before 7 p.m. Wednesday at Just-inTime Recreation, a 34-lane bowling alley where the $75 “Pizza, Pins and Pepsi” special included a large pizza, a pitcher of soda and two hours of bowling for six people.
One bowler had just removed his shoes when he thought he heard a balloon popping some 15 feet behind him. He turned toward the door, saw a man holding a gun and took off running down one of the lanes.
“I slid basically into where the pins are and climbed up into the machine,” he said.
The gunman, Robert Card, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot Friday, two nights after he destroyed an innocent night of bowling and socializing and turned it into tragedy. People gunned down bowling for strikes and spares, throwing beanbags, shooting pool, having beers with friends, working the night shift.
For Asselin and her mother, Tammy, the situation was especially gut-wrenching. A coach hustled the 10-year-old and several of her youth league teammates outside. An employee hid some of the children in a backroom office while other workers barricaded themselves in a freezer. She became separated from her mother, who initially stood frozen as others fled.
Turning to run, Tammy Asselin tripped over some bowling ball bags and took a hard fall before hiding behind an overturned table and calling 911. Authorities said the first of multiple calls came in at 6:56 p.m. Four plainclothes officers who were at a nearby shooting range arrived a minute and a half after the first call, followed by uniformed officers less than three minutes later.
At one point, a young boy turned to Asselin. “Don’t cry,” he told her. “It will be OK.”
Several more shots were followed by a strange silence.
“Is he hunting or is he dead?” Asselin thought. “Is it safe? Are the police here?”
“Does anyone see Toni?” she shouted before being hushed by others who worried the shooter was still there.
“I had thought maybe the last shot we heard, he had taken his life,” she said.
Instead, the shooter headed 4 miles south to Schemengees Bar & Grille, where workers from other bars and restaurants could get 25% discounts every Wednesday night and employees were collecting Halloween-themed cocktail recipes for a cornhole tournament planned for later in the week.
The restaurant was hosting an event for members of the deaf community, and cornhole games were underway when a man entered and started shooting. In total, 18 people would be killed at the bowling alley and restaurant. Thirteen others were wounded.
Peyton Brewer-Ross, who enjoyed the game of cornhole so much that he brought out the angled boards and bags at family gatherings, had a spot next to the door and was likely one of the first at the bar to die, according to his brother.
“When he was shot, he was doing the thing he loved,” Wellman Brewer said.
Bar manager Joe Walker picked up a butcher knife and tried to stop the gunman, Walker’s father told multiple media outlets.
“And that’s when he shot my son to death,” Leroy Walker told WGME-TV.
Walker said his son was shot twice in the stomach.
“He died as a hero,” he told NBC News.